Friday, April 22nd 2016
AMD to Custom-design CPUs for the Chinese Government
AMD could custom-design enterprise CPUs for the Chinese Government. The move was announced in the company's latest quarterly results. China's quest for its "own" hardware and software running government and state-run companies and institutions, hit a roadblock with the government's inability to come up with a reliable enterprise processor, particularly one that runs on the x86 architecture. That need could be fulfilled by Sunnyvale, California-based AMD; which could design special enterprise CPUs under close supervision of the Chinese authorities under a joint-venture with a state-run company. This deal could earn AMD USD $293 million in cash.
In a joint venture between AMD and THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd.), AMD's x86 expertise could be put to use in developing everything between tiny SoCs to large, multi-socket CPUs that drive enterprise machines (data-centers, HPC farms, military cyber infrastructure), for the Chinese government, and state-run companies. At this point, neither of the companies are commenting on which kind of x86 core architecture from AMD could be adopted. AMD has two distinct types of x86 cores, low-power, high-density cores such as "Jaguar," which can be found on devices such as the Sony PlayStation 4, and large modular cores such as the ones found on its FX-series and Opteron X-series CPUs.
In a joint venture between AMD and THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd.), AMD's x86 expertise could be put to use in developing everything between tiny SoCs to large, multi-socket CPUs that drive enterprise machines (data-centers, HPC farms, military cyber infrastructure), for the Chinese government, and state-run companies. At this point, neither of the companies are commenting on which kind of x86 core architecture from AMD could be adopted. AMD has two distinct types of x86 cores, low-power, high-density cores such as "Jaguar," which can be found on devices such as the Sony PlayStation 4, and large modular cores such as the ones found on its FX-series and Opteron X-series CPUs.