Microsoft And AMD Planning For ARM-based CPUs

While Apple is marching further and further away with its ARM SoCs in terms of performance, the competition is desperately trying to develop its own chips that can keep up. Now even Microsoft and AMD are supposed to work together on an ARM SoC for PCs.

The fact that AMD is working on an ARM SoC together with Samsung has been official for a long time, with the Exynos 2200 for the first time such a chip will be introduced for smartphones, which will then also bring a Radeon GPU. At Microsoft, we always sat so far, however, the long-time partner Qualcomm, also when it comes to chips such as Microsoft SQ1 or SQ2, of the Surface Pro X is serving.

A rumor from South Korea According to Microsoft, however, is now also to cooperate with AMD in order to jointly offer processors for use in 2-in-1 devices and light, yet powerful notebooks with an ARM platform. The two companies are allegedly part of a group of companies that is working to counter Apple’s ARM SoCs, which are now being used in more and more Macs.

First details

However, it is currently still open who the other participants are. But there is talk that Microsoft wants to use the new ARM processors developed together with AMD in its Surface devices. The chips should offer a graphics performance just below the Nvidia GeForce GTX1050 and use an internal GPU with eight processing units. The graphics unit is said to have a very low power consumption of only four watts.

Actually, AMD should have already planned the new ARM-based platform for an introduction this year. In the end, however, one supposedly had to switch from Samsung to TSMC as a manufacturing partner because the Korean electronics giant is said to have had problems with the yield in production. It is said that there will be delays due to the design changes that are now required. According to the report, the ARM chip developed by AMD will be based on the ARM Cortex-X1 architecture, i.e. use the last generation of high-end cores based on ARM.

It is not yet clear whether the SoC also has energy-saving cores from one of the other ARM architectures. In any case, this is an unconfirmed rumor for which there is no evidence other than the claims of a Korean forum user. As a licensee of ARM, AMD definitely has the option of developing its own processors based on these architectures but has so far used them practically exclusively in the server market.