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workstation and server jobs

I am of the opinion, that eventually both are going to be impacted. Specifically, that with both, you can get a General Purpose Intel chip, or an ARM with or without custom bits added. The custom bits being application specific enhancements that Intel cannot offer. Here are a few ARM Server articles.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX...

As for Desktops, they are now in our hands, and called Smartphones, and they are all using ARM. Intel may be left owning the dying Windows PC Market soon.

It is all a matter of perspective, but I see it as the needs of the market are shifting away from WinTel.

The Cavium chips handle multiple PCI-e 3.0 ports. Here's a brief on the I/O capabilities (though it doesn't go into much detail):
http://cavium.com/ThunderX2_AR...

Yes.

Though why just 10-gig-e? The ARM chips I'm working with support multiple integrated 40-gig-e ports and multiple PCIe gen 3 buses.

I have the data sheet for the chip being discussed in the article in front of me. While I can't go into details, it is no slouch and has a massive amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. 10G? That's nothing. I regularly deal with 80G (dual 40G XLAUI) with this chip. The ARM chips are a newer generation than this so the cores are faster.

Some of the ARM chips I work with have built-in RAID engines for offloading all of the RAID calculations as well as engines for a number of other things. Here is a link that shows the I/O oriented chips.

Yes.

Though why just 10-gig-e? The ARM chips I'm working with support multiple integrated 40-gig-e ports and multiple PCIe gen 3 buses.

I have the data sheet for the chip being discussed in the article in front of me. While I can't go into details, it is no slouch and has a massive amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. 10G? That's nothing. I regularly deal with 80G (dual 40G XLAUI) with this chip. The ARM chips are a newer generation than this so the cores are faster.

Some of the ARM chips I work with have built-in RAID engines for offloading all of the RAID calculations as well as engines for a number of other things. Here is a link that shows the I/O oriented chips.

Take a look at Cavium ... 48 cores x 64bit at 2.5 ghz.

http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX...

Look up the 410Nv. It has 4 SFP+ ports on it.

8 core 64 bit ARM chips with GPU built in are fairly common and 10 core chips already announced (Mediatek), with 16-48 core vaguely hinted at for servers by other vendors

A bit more than hinting: Cavium is selling 24-48 core ThunderX (ARMv8) chips. I think the first one shipped a month or two ago.

I don't see what the big deal is. I'm currently working with early silicon on a cache coherent 48-core 64-bit MIPS chip with NUMA support and built-in 40Gbps Ethernet support. The chip also has a lot of extended instructions for encryption and hashing plus a lot of hardware engines for things like zip compression, RAID calculations, regular expression engines and networking support among other things. It also has built-in support for content addressable memory.

It also has a network on-chip where each core or group of cores can have its own network interface to other cores. This is useful for things like virtualization or when you want to run multiple Linux kernels and other applications side by side since we also support running binaries on bare metal without an OS underneath.

http://cavium.com/OCTEON-III_C...

Cavium OCTEON series of CPUs. http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-I...

The problem is that PHP and web programmers are quite common. Even so, places like Facebook are looking for PHP developers and SQL engineers. Trying to find decent C programmers, especially those capable of working on embedded systems or the Linux kernel or device drivers are much harder to find. As for college, good luck getting started in the industry without a degree unless you've managed to make a name for yourself without it on some well known project.

For example:

(Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/careers/search?q=&location=menlo-park
(Google) https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/
(Apple) http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/corporate.html
(Tesla) http://tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=TESLA&cws=1
(Cavium) http://www.cavium.com/careers.html
(Amazon Lab 126) http://www.lab126.com/careers.htm
(Yahoo) http://us.careers.yahoo.com/
(Xilinx) https://xapps9.xilinx.com/OA_HTML/RF.jsp?function_id=12325&resp_id=23350&resp_appl_id=800&security_group_id=0&lang_code=US&params=mCsTre-AToe2wnIXflPtqsZZTnVM9.N1OyhNnBv5KuqbLKT.chxR3de6DRGMEkZb&oas=suuh5UdozJuyoXGEIHQclw..
(Altera) http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH03/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=ALTERA&cws=1
(Intel) http://jobs.intel.com/
(Qualcomm) https://jobs.qualcomm.com/public/jobSearch.xhtml#messages

I am certainly not lying nor a shill. These are just off the top of my head. Many of these sites have pages of openings as well as openings for new college graduates.

My employer generally only hires full-time at the standard going rates around Silicon Valley. We're looking for people with networking experience, embedded processor experience (especially multi-core 64-bit MIPS and ARM, though 64-bit ARM is new), multi-threaded/multi core experience (most of our CPUs are multi-core, our next major chip will support 4-way NUMA with 48 cores per chip). We're also looking for Linux kernel engineers and application optimization engineers. I don't know what salaries are being offered, but it should be competitive. Most positions are fairly senior level though we're also looking for FAEs and test engineers.

We're hiring hardware engineers as well.

http://www.cavium.com/careers.html

Out of curiosity I also looked at Tesla Motor's web site to try and get an idea on what they're doing. They too have a lot of openings for engineering.

http://tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=TESLA&cws=1

Search for CN6880-4NIC10E. It has a Cavium OCTEON CN6880 32-core CPU on it with dual DDR3 interfaces. It would take some work to make it run Debian (requires running the root filesystem over NFS over PCIe or 10Gbe). All of the changes to support Linux are in the process of being pushed upstream to the Linux kernel GIT repository and hopefully sometime in the future I will get enough time to start pushing my U-Boot bootloader changes upstream as well.

All of the toolchain support is in the mainline GCC and binutils and glibc, though some of it might be in GIT since we just pushed our stuff up recently. The toolchain supports all of the extended instructions including those used for encryption and hashing.

There is a SDK but the SDK is generally quite expensive. The SDK is used for writing stand-alone applications that run on bare-metal on various cores in parallel with the Linux kernel. That way Linux runs on some cores and custom networking applications run on other cores without the overhead of a general-purpose operating system. Of course Linux could just as easily run on all the cores. It's a nice 64-bit MIPS platform as long as you don't need floating point. The CPU also has built-in acceleration for encryption, hashing, compression (deflate), pattern matching (regex) and RAID calculations (XOR/RAID6).

The PCIe bus just looks like another high-speed network interface as far as the CPU is concerned, so the card can basically be a network accelerator card for things like encryption or disk I/O. There's SDK add-ons to support things like TCP acceleration, Samba, SNORT, IPSEC and more.