Comment by arnon
12 days ago
> please don’t think of AMD as an x86 company, we are a computing company, and we will use the right compute engine for the right workload.
Love that quote.
12 days ago
> please don’t think of AMD as an x86 company, we are a computing company, and we will use the right compute engine for the right workload.
Love that quote.
Yep, I think that's the best quote of the interview and the runner up is the Napster quote.
People seems to have forgotten that Intel used to had StrongARM in their lineup, with the same logic Intel is a computing company not x86 company, similar to AMD [1].
For one of the latest trends in the computing landscape please check this new Embedded+ platform recently introduced by AMD [2]. I'm biased towards IoT but I've a very strong feeling that IoT is the killer application of AI, similar to AI is a killer application of HPC as the latter statement was mentioned by Lisa Su during the interview. The turning point for IoT however is yet to happen, it will probably happened when the number of machine nodes talking to directly to each other, surpassing the number of machine nodes talking to human, then it will be its ChatGPT moment.
[1] StrongARM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
[2] AMD Unveils Embedded+ Architecture; Combines Embedded Processors with Adaptive SoCs to Accelerate Time-to-Market for Edge AI Applications:
https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-2-6-amd-...
Crazy that they need to write such things because incompetent investors think that ISA has huge implications
It has huge implications because it makes competing in that market much harder due to licensing issues. Intel and AMD have a duopoly on the x86 market which compromises a huge chunk of server and personal computing, but that is changing fast. If they go ARM (or risc-v or whatever) they will have more competition to contend with, including their existing cloud computing clients designing their own chips and fabbing them with other foundries.
I was going to correct you on the duopoly, but apparently the Cyrix/Centaur/Via agreement expired some time ago.
Perf/Energy implications
The shocker is: a lot of engineers think that the ISA has huge implications.
There was an interview with one of the SPARC creators who said that a huge benefit of control of the instruction set was the ability to take the platform in directions that (Intel) resellers could not.
He was otherwise largely agnostic on the benefits of SPARC.
ISA shouldn’t be more than a 10% or 20% performance impact or so, per jim Keller
2 replies →
ISAs do have huge implications. A poorly designed ISA can balloon the instruction count, which has a direct impact on program size and the call stack.
Investors dont care about those nerdy details
The talk is about perf and energy usage, where diff between x86 and arm is not even close to what they believe