[citation][nom]mr_wobbles[/nom]There is no mention of ARM cores in these, plus theres no reason to HAVE an ARM core in X86. ARM flounders under high loads. AMD I think is doing it the right way, as their 45nm and 32nm Chips offer resistance to the mainly 32nm shovelware Intel Chips. Also remember Intel and Nvidia fanboys, AMD is the only thing that keeps the price down on CPUs and GPUs. These are thin-light ultrabooks, and with this kind of processing power, compared to the seemingly hotter running INTEL (ive got Phen2 in my laptop and it runs the same, if not colder than my friends I5) really, 8-4 cores in an area where it used to be absurd if there was a Dual-Core? Seems legit to me, lets just hope on Piledriver. After all, which new architecture worked well the first time? Compare the Phenom1 and 2, or the first major Dual and Quadcores. ALL OF THEM SUCKED. Then Intel and AMD messed around with them and they were the best thing you could get for the time. Bulldozer may have let AMD fans down, but never give up on AMD. They've saved themselves before.[/citation]
AMD is working on ARM-based chips for the low-end. You wouldn't have heard any public announcements about them recently, but this is why AMD made a big presense at that recent ARM show from last year. What AMD wants is better power efficiency out of the general computing cores and x86 can't provide that. Microsoft's plan to support ARM as a mainstream architecture alternative to x86 is opening the door to a new world of cross-platform software compatibility too. What ARM is getting out of the deal is AMD's experience with extending existing architectures to the 64-bit world without breaking compatibility, along with better graphics options. ARM has decent multimedia support (better than Atom for HD media), but they want to have better 3D options along the lines of DX11 (ARM only currently supports OpenGL ES 2.0 which is, at best, similar to the capabilities of D3D7).
None of this has any bearing on their current plans for x86 in the mainstream and high-end chips - for now. This is only relating to the low-cost chips where media consumption requires high-end multimedia performance without much in the way of general computing (beyond the capabilities of ARM, anyway).
Maybe by the time Windows 9 is announced, we'll see an announcement from AMD. This is the next major Fusion project for AMD though so it will likely take a few years.
....and if you're wondering: trade show reps have loose lips.