AMD's ARM Efforts Appear Stalled, But At Least Zen Should Be Great

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 9 December 2016 at 08:00 AM EST. 39 Comments
AMD
This week's news of Qualcomm sampling a 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC for servers made me wonder where are AMD's ARM SoCs -- and the long-awaited development boards -- and thus been following up with a few sources this week.

I last wrote about the AMD ARM efforts in September when mentioning It Doesn't Look Like We'll See AMD ARM Development Boards This Year. The AMD ARM developer boards are long overdue but the promising LeMaker Cello and HuskyBoard products still aren't available and I hear from sources that AMD ARM has been having some PCI-E / SATA issues as what caused the original delays while now AMD seems to be losing interest in ARM, especially with Zen being right around the corner.

The HuskyBoard is M.I.A. and the newer Cello Board was supposed to ship in Q2'2016 but clearly missed that. LeMaker and other resources on the Cello haven't even bothered to be updated past their "The LeMaker Cello main board is scheduled to ship in Q2 of 2016" text to provide any update on the matter.

It looks like we might never see these low-cost AMD ARM development boards. SoftIron appears to be the only company selling an AMD Opteron A1100 system so far, and claims to be in stock, but will set you back $2495 USD.

So from those I communicated with this week, the unofficial explanation is that AMD all but dropped these ARM efforts to focus on Zen and according to one there doesn't seem to be a future with AMD and ARM for the short term. Pity, as I've been very excited to see the AMD ARM Linux experience and benchmarks... But if there's a consolation prize, AMD Zen does indeed appear to be shaping up very nicely.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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