AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to
sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a
keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open
Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack
the datacenter, breaking the replication of resources and low volume,
high-margin parts that have traditionally been Intel's bread-and-butter.
AMD is claiming that the eight ARM cores offer 2-4x the compute performance
of the Opteron X1250 — which isn't terribly surprising, considering
that the X1250 is a four-core chip based on the Jaguar CPU, with a
relatively low clock speed of 1.1 — 1.9GHz. We still don't know the
target clock speeds for the Seattle cores, but the embedded roadmaps AMD
has released show the ARM embedded part actually targeting a higher
level of CPU performance (and a higher TDP) than the Jaguar core itself.
