AMD or ATI
Article seems to assume the license is for the traditional AMD biz. Maybe it is for the ATI part (a controlling CPU core on GPGPU cards?)
Underdog, disrupter and casualty – AMD’s been on a rollercoaster ride in its battle against Intel. AMD rose on the strength of its 64-bit, x86-compatible server processors as Intel was penalised on Itanium; Intel re-bounded with the Xeon E5 as AMD got dragged down by IT spending cuts and problems with its Barcelona Opterons. …
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Speaking as a shareholder, my vote says don't let anyone take it over.
The more shares you own, the more say you get over its future if there should ever be a bid. I consider a bid unlikely unless it stumbles really badly and starts to look vulnerable. But then, big companies with huge cash piles can get irrational, and look what happened to Autonomy!
I think the main benefit of ARM will be just how many processors we can squeeze into a traditional 1U or 3U rack mount server. It could be the trump card, on average, the most we ever see from Intel based servers is 4 Xeons, with 4 to 6 physical cores per CPU gives us 16 t0 24 cores on average, per server
ARM offerings may well exceed that with lower power, however will these AMD/ARM offerings give us the stability and IOPS that the virtualisation centric server market is hungry for?
The Achilles Heel may well be the chipset, AMD servers have never been as "good" as Intel's offerings when it comes to the chipset logic offerd on server systems. The ARM alternatives may resolve to SoC to overcome this 'issue' but.. if the AMD / ARM collaboration can develop shit hot chipsets with decent IO throughput and component (RAM, SCSI/SAS, NIC) and management compatibility, then they may just be on to a winner.
Let's play the waiting game...