AMD tiptoes past sparring rivals in embedded CPU foray The new management team at Advanced Micro Devices is looking everywhere, including under the couch cushions, to find some money so it can afford to explore the embedded systems market again. The chip biz hopes rivals Intel and the ARM collective are too distracted to notice the foray as they fight over each others' territories …
Via already learned that the hard way. The idea of AMD doing niche SOCs frankly smells like another bit of history repeating.
Via tried to carve itself a niche with SOC-like offerings. Intel came, intel put out Atom which in its original incarnation with original chipset sucked bricks sidewise through a thin straw and was nowhere near Via offering. It was however 2x cheaper, so Intel conquered, Intel extinguished the market and it is no more.
AMD should not design itself into a niche. That is the beginning of the end.
To be fair, the VIA CPUs were far slower than the Atom CPUs, and used a lot more power. It is only since Atom has come out that VIA has actually pushed the Nano X2 processor. The issue is that VIA's systems are quite expensive for what you get, Mini-ITX was meant to be cheap, but the prices never came down. Now VIA has mostly left the CPU/motherboard market, at least in the west.
As for AMD, in the long run I can see some use in them working on 64-bit ARMv8 SoCs for embedded and server uses. I wonder if they have been working on a CPU core that can run both ARM64 and AMD64...
Such as what?
Can anyone name two x86-independent Intel successes in the last two decades?
Now, who can find a dozen or so massively-promoted but ultimately unsuccessful Intel developments in the same period.
i860? i960? iaPX432? i2o? IA64? uBiquitous iWiMax? iDunno any more, do you?
I quite liked the ixp422/425 ARM-based networking chips, but (a) they mostly sold off their ARM business (2) the ARM ecosystem has moved on massively and Intel haven't.
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