US multinational semiconductor company AMD has unveiled a strategic product development roadmap that gives increasing importance to ARM instruction sets for future client, server, and embedded processors.

AMD's decision to offer both ARM and its bread-and-butter x86 designs is driven by market forces. The total addressable market for x86 is weakening but is increasing for ARM. By offering OEMs pin compatible x86/ARM solutions, AMD addresses both markets and gets to cover both bases at the same time.

"Today is about innovation," said AMD president and CEO Rory Read in announcing the move to ARM. "Today, we're going to talk about that next step as we embark upon our ambidextrous roadmap to develop a 'skybridge' technology that connects our IP on a single SoC."

Project Skybridge is AMD's code name for its effort to create pin-compatible processors using either the x86 or ARM architecture that can drop into one-socket-fits-all platforms for PCs and embedded systems.

Future Skybridge parts, both the x86 and ARM versions, will support AMD's move to the 20 nanometer process. They will include AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. AMD said only Skybridge can accomplish these tasks.

The x86-based Skybridge accelerated processing units (APUs) will carry AMD's next-generation Puma central processor cores. The ARM-based chips will utilize low-power, 64 bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores and will be AMD's first Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Android platform.

Project Skybridge APUs for clients and embedded systems will be based on AMD's HSA and will hit the market in 2015, said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Global Business Units.

AMD believes both the x86 and ARM will be the dominant architectures to meet perpetual demand for more compute to propel new capabilities and experiences.

Su said this is the first time the x86 and ARM SoCs have been put together in a way that they are "pin-compatible," meaning a motherboard can run both. Skybridge will also produce AMD's first ARM-based chips supporting Android.

ARM is a family of instruction set architectures for computer processors based on a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture developed by ARM Holdings, a British company. A RISC-based computer design approach means ARM processors require much fewer transistors than typical do typical CISC x86 processors in many personal computers.

The reduction in costs, heat and power use means ARM processors are suitable for light, portable, battery-powered devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablet and notepad computers. A simpler design facilitates more efficient multi-core CPUs and higher core counts at lower cost, providing improved energy efficiency for servers.

AMD and rival Intel have made the x86 instruction set the dominant force in PC and server chips over the past couple of decades.