The pieces of the puzzle were certainly present, with the inclusion of ARM tech as security modules in some AMD SoCs, the buyout of SeaMicro, popular for its ARM server clusters, ongoing-work to generate a common AMD-ARM interconnect and AMD's Heterogeneous aspirations, however, it wasn't clear just how much of the picture AMD had pieced together and indeed, how big the picture AMD had envisioned was in the first place, however today, we have the beginnings of an answer.
Building on the concepts of its open Fusion System Architecture announced last year, AMD has revealed that in 2014, it will release 64-bit ARM-based Opterons for scalable clustered servers. On-die will sit multiple ARMv8 CPU cores, multiple server-class APU cores (whether of ARM or AMD design is yet TBC), along with SeaMicro's Freedom interconnect 'Fabric', providing a standardised interconnect between chips for efficient clustering.
We have a feeling that AMD ultimately plans to offer a healthy mixture of APUs and x86 and ARM CPUs that seamlessly interconnect for highly bespoke solutions, though it will likely be the latter-half of the decade before we see the firm reach this stage.
