AMD: 28 nm Server Steamroller APUs, ARM CPUs Coming Next Year

From DailyTech: With rumors brewing that Intel Corp. (INTC) may be delaying its 14 nanometer Broadwell die shrink to 2015, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) did its best to seize the spotlight showing off a new roadmap with an aggressive schedule of releases for next year.

The biggest release of the year will arguably be the Seattle server processor, AMD's first ARM architecture design.

The server market has seen significantly more competition from an architecture standpoint than the personal computer CPU market in recent years. Yet ARM has yet to make significant inroads in this lucrative space. Currently the server chip market is dominated by Intel who relies on the x86 architecture.

AMD has long supported x86 as well, and its x86 chips are well regarded among supercomputer builders as delivering strong multi-threaded performance and performance-per-cost, though trailing Intel's more expensive cores in pure single threaded performance.

Seattle will come in 8- and 16-core varieties, with clock speeds "at or greater than 2 GHz". The chip is a modified ARM Cortex-A57 IP core, which AMD is licensing from ARM Holdings Plc (LON:ARM). AMD looks to integrated a powerful ensemble of helper cores with the new die, including compression and "server caliber" encryption engines, plus 10 GbE networking support. AMD says the core should be able to deliver 2-4 times the performance of the Opteron X-Series, its current low power option, while offering "significant" reductions to the TDP (power consumption) over comparable X-Series designs. Seattle drops in H2 2014.

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