Posted on Monday, May 02 2011 @ 21:35 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Last week a story was making the rounds that ARM was trying to convert AMD to the ARM architecture, but AMD came out to stress that it has no plans to license ARM's architecture and that it intends to keep x86 everywhere. The collaboration between the companies will focus on APIs only.
It took AMD two whole days to respond in the form of a PCWorld article citing John Taylor, director of client product and software marketing at AMD. According to Taylor, AMD currently has no plans to acquire an ARM license. He continues that AMDs strong CPU and graphics technology will be employed to design chips for tablets. One of these designs codenamed Krishna has only recently taped out.
Basically this means, AMD will use a chip based on the x86 microarchitecture currently employed in a majority of PCs and notebooks for a tablet design. Even their current generation APUs based on the Ontario core is slated to be used in a handful tablets in a specialized 5W SKU. However, the most prominent hype revolves around Apples iPad and Android based devices like Motorola's Xoom or Samsung's galaxy Tab as well as RIMs Playbook which use processors based on the ARM architecture. Also the majority of smartphones employ ARM processors.
Source: Bright Side of News
