I don't see AMD's play here. What value do they add with a processor that they don't design, don't fab, and can't produce in the kind of volume tablet and phone chips get produced?
It's possible that this is their first foray into ARM with a core license to get a feel, and their next iteration will be with an architecture license (which they can get some design value add).
I don't understand your comment. "Doesn't design and doesn't fab" describes every ARM licensee. Also, this chip isn't going anywhere near phones or tablets. Did you look at the specifications?
The other ARM licensees have a hook: Qualcomm integrates with its LTE base bands, Apple builds a phone around it, etc. The phone/tablet angle is important because the high volumes in those markets help justify big design teams at Qualcomm and Apple.
System level design, integration with gpgpu. Inspite of being dwarfed by Intel in the x86 space I would imagine AMD has the engineering bandwidth to compete with the current arm based designers - qualcomm and samsung.
AMD has actually donated some nice amount of engineer-hours to enable ImageMagick to use OpenCL. And the difference is massive.
So if you have a webservice that allows users to upload images and then subsequently processes the images it's cost efficient to purchase few AMD APU's instead of massive Intel Xeon server.
There are a lot of other things to do, but Imagemagick is something that has support for it right now.
