Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE:AMD) to team up with ARM

Intel Corporation(NASDAQ:INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.(NYSE:AMD) might be rivals, with both being at the top of the game, but it is the latter which will be making chips in collaboration with the ARM Holdings. Intel is a very good silicon fabricator, and the company has resources, both economic, and in terms of brain-power. But the company is too comfortable within its own chips architecture, x86 or IA, and it does not seem like the company would want to move out of its comfort zone. Intel does have an architectural license for ARM, which is a very deep involvement with the intellectual property of the British intelligentsia. The company still sips XScale processors at a very large rate, which are ARM-based ones.

However, despite the availability of almost everything, AMD took off SeaMicro from the table. The company specializes in the “fabric” aspect, in the sense that it provides servers with internal communications infrastructure. This infrastructure is what is called the fabric, and AMD now possesses it. Freedom Fabric is what will be used to make the servers by AMD. These servers will be ARM-based, and will be dense, to be used for cloud computing and cloud applications. These servers will be in the market by 2014.

The servers will solve one of the main problems regarding ARM-based servers, which was something even Intel had brought up. The usual servers along this line have a 32-bit architecture, which does not leave much scope for good memory. It can support up to 4 GB of memory, which is very basic, if one is to look at it objectively. But Advanced Micro Devices will not be falling into that trap anytime soon. The company is to increase it to a 64-bit architecture, to help support more memory. AMD and Arm is probably going to continue, and deepen the work relationship, and the latter shared space with the former for a panel, which was held in Seattle sometime earlier in 2012. The company also announced the use of ARM A5 cores for security-based functions on APUs. AMD seems well on its way to making the ARM-based servers very soon.