After more than a decade of losing out to Intel in the x86 chip battle, AMD now appears to lack the fighting spirit needed to keep the company afloat, and is now making headways to manufacture new chips based on ARM. These AMD chips are not for the masses, from what we understand - AMD plans to use ARM chips on the server side instead of in consumer products such as smartphones and tablets.

AMD has shown signs of moving over to ARM processor for quite some time now. In 2012, the American chip giant showed interest in integrating ARM based processors onto its own x86 chips, and has since managed to do so with its x86 ARM hybrid chip designed for the embedded market.

However, AMD's new ARM chip codenamed "Seattle," is the first time in the history of AMD that the company has move away from the x86 platform. By utilizing ARM on the server end, AMD hopes to drive down the cost of owning a server. It is long known that x86 processors are more expensive than ARM, so AMD could be onto something here that might allow the company to reshape the server market

"Our strategy is to differentiate ourselves by using our unique IP to build server processors that are particularly well matched to a target workload and thereby drive down the total cost of owning servers. This strategy unfolds across both the enterprise and data centers and includes leveraging our graphics processing capabilities and embracing both x86 and ARM instruction sets," said Andrew Feldman, general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. "AMD led the world in the transition to multicore processors and 64-bit computing, and we intend to do it again with our next-generation AMD Opteron families."

According to AMD, Seattle is an 8- and then 16-core CPU based on the ARM Cortex-A57 core, and it is expected to run at 2GHz, which is not too shabby. The processor will deliver 128GB DRAM support, efficiency and reduced CPU loading, server caliber encryption, and compression and legacy networking including integrated 10GbE. Production should go into effect by the second quarter of 2014, however, sample testing should begin by the first quarter.