http://anandtech.com/show/7991/amd-is-also-working-on-a-new-64bit-x86-core

They're also making a custom ARM core with it. There's few specifics as of yet, but they intend to target future consoles (what they call "semi-custom"). A great deal of AMD's revenue currently comes from the PS4 and Xbox One so it makes sense that they'd design it towards that.

This is a big deal because it was uncertain if AMD would continue to make chips for desktops/servers at all. They haven't announced new designs in these areas for a few years.

This is great news for the PC market if the new product can be competitive. They will however need to make up a 40%+ deficit in single thread performance against Intel, and they will only have access to very much inferior process tech to do it (Samsung 22nm BEOL+14nm FEOL hybrid vs true Intel 14nm).

Intel has already proven with Medfield that x86 can scale down to the same power requirements as ARM, with better performance thanks to intels fabrication prowess.
And with binary translation... Can also run ARM based apps too.
However outside of a few select tablets/phones like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1, Intel has had little success.

As for 64bit specifically, it's not really needed, sure Phones are not far away from pushing past the 4Gb of Ram barrier, but 32bit can extend pass that limit, the extra transisters spent on 64bit could have been spent on better cores.
Where the real advantage of having 64bit ARM cores is mostly in the server space, which is a *massive* and lucrative market, one that Intel will try to continue to control by throwing it's latest Atom cores at.


I can't wait for AMD to finally ditch the slow and power hungry FX based processors, Intel's quad-cores are faster than AMD's Octo-cores.

Define "Quad-core."  Now that games and apps are utilizing 8 cores fully this really isn't true.  The FX-6300 is just a hair below the weaker i5's, and the FX-8350 is in between an i5 and i7.  Yeah, the i7 beats the FX-83xx, but it does so by using hyper threading so I wouldn't necessarily call it just a "Quad-core."

This come from someone who has owned/used an i5, i7, and 8320.

I wish IBM would just jump in and stomp Intel.  They currently have an 8-core cpu and through hyperthreading each core can read 12 lines of code each for a total of 96 threads!  Oh and it runs above 4 GHz...

Intel's cores are easily better than IBM's, remember, clockspeed became irrellevant years ago for comparing CPU performance.
If IBM truly did have a powerhouse of a CPU, then they would be controlling a much much much larger share of the lucrative server pie, which values absolute performance over power in many scenario's.

Also, Intel has 8 and 16 core Xeon's.

It is true, even in heavily multi-threaded tasks, Intel's quad-core processors, literally continue to wipe the floor with AMD's octo-cores.

I can limit applications to 4 threads on my Core i7 3930K and even in instances such as encoding which is VERY CPU heavy and can make use of as many threads as you can throw at it... It still wipes the floor with my Phenom 2 x6, old AMD FX 8120, AMD FX 8320 with all cores utilised on the AMD processors.

The irony of it is, Haswell would be faster than my Sandy Bridge-E in cases where up-to 4 threads are being used, by probably 20% or more.

The other take away is, lightly threaded applications (They exist and continue to be released) will always be favored massively on a Core iX than an AMD processor.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/698?vs=287

You call this whipping the floor:

http://www.bf4blog.com/battlefield-4-retail-gpu-cpu-benchmarks/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4960x-ivy-bridge-e-benchmark,3557-5.html

Like I said it is inbetween the i5's and i7's.  I don't know what benchmarks you are running.  I never claimed it would win in lazily threaded apps.

Intel's cores are easily better than IBM's, remember, clockspeed became irrellevant years ago for comparing CPU performance.
If IBM truly did have a powerhouse of a CPU, then they would be controlling a much much much larger share of the lucrative server pie, which values absolute performance over power in many scenario's.

Also, Intel has 8 and 16 core Xeon's.

So you just don't think it can compete at all?  I mean I'll just agree to disagree on that one lol.  Oh and IBM has 12 core CPU's at 5 GHz that run 12 threads each (On 22nm).  If you don't think that would stomp a measily 30 thread  (It has 15 cores buddy) at 3.8 GHz you really are an Intel Fanboy.

It's not all about having higher IPC's either ... Once you need ridiculously large vectors that demand AVX-1024 the IPC argument becomes totally worthless as most applications are simply don't have this structure to take advantange of the high amount of instruction level parallelism. 

http://abinstein.blogspot.ca/2010/09/ipc-myths.html

Despite the fact that abinstein has a clear bias for AMD he's absolutely right about this issue. (This abinstein is probably the same one from AMDZone.) 

The only way we could probably realistically increase single threaded performance in the future is that we would basically need to increase the clocks or get instruction set extensions dedicated to increasing single threaded performance. 

I'm not sure if you would consider this to be a powerhouse but here it goes ... Each Power8 core has 2 VMX units and likely 4 single precision floating point units which basically means that the processor at hand is capable of 12 Fused Multiply-Add instructions so each core can pull off 24 flops/cycle. With 12 cores all clocked at 5 Ghz would mean that it can do 1.44 Teraflops tops! No that is not small and I think this may have being the first commercial CPU to do that. (Aside from the xeon phi ofcourse.)

I would agree with you about IBM controlling alot more of the server market than it has now because of more power but the tools and everything else is so much better on the x86 side of things. 

You call this whipping the floor:

http://www.bf4blog.com/battlefield-4-retail-gpu-cpu-benchmarks/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4960x-ivy-bridge-e-benchmark,3557-5.html

Like I said it is inbetween the i5's and i7's.  I don't know what benchmarks you are running.  I never claimed it would win in lazily threaded apps.

I wasn't actually talking about IPC specifically. :P
Intel and AMD as well as to a lesser extent, via... Actually spend more transisters on trying to hide latency and bandwidth deficits with various technologies than actuall compute hardware.
And for a good reason!

When IBM had it's PowerPC based processors inside the Mac, there was allot of flamboyant chit-chat with enthusiasts of how superior IBM PowerPC based processors were when compared to x86, in the end, when Apple switched processor architectures, there was stupidly massive gains in almost every area.
Granted, that was many many years ago and architectures of both camps have changed drastically since then.

Unfortunatly, we can't run 3D mark to find out how they compare. :P