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Samsung May Start Making ARM Server Chips
angry tapir writes "Samsung's recent licensing of 64-bit processor designs from ARM suggests that the chip maker may expand from smartphones and tablets into the server market, analysts believe. Samsung last week licensed ARM's first 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors, a sign the chip maker is preparing the groundwork to develop 64-bit chips for low-power servers, analysts said. The faster 64-bit processors will appear in servers, high-end smartphones and tablets, and offer better performance-per-watt than ARM's current 32-bit processors, which haven't been able to expand beyond embedded and mobile devices. The first servers with 64-bit ARM processors are expected to become available in 2014."
I understand the implications of lower power for infrastructure reasons. Lower power means lower cost for power, lower cooling needs, etc. I get that. But what is the "Killer app" for these low power servers? Is it data warehousing? Simple web hosting? I can see these being useful for odds-and-ends servers in data centers with bigger iron for more heavy duty apps, but why is everyone jumping on this bandwagon?
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The new Google Nexus phones are shipping with 2GB of ram, and its conceivable that tablets will being shipping with > 4GB of ram within a few years. It just looks like Samsung is covering their bases for the future.
Bye!
..and sammy would probably license any chip arm makes anyhow, if only to just check it out.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I would gladly welcome commodity server motherboards with ARM 64 bits CPUs. I trust I would easily find a suitable distro for my home server.
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There's no technical reason why an ARM chip of comparable performance to x86 could not be made. There's also no reason to believe such a beast would use significantly less power than an x86 chip, either. In order for the entire exercise to make any sense, they would have to target a niche between current ARM and x86. If they can keep the design sufficiently simple, they should at least be able to beat current ARM designs in performance and x86 in price. It is not clear that they can beat future Intel CPUs on power usage, especially since Intel's manufacturing process leads the industry by a significant margin.
I seriously doubt Apple will ever switch to ARM chips in OS X (not iOS) machines. They don't provide enough performance to run at the level of current OS X machines, not to mention that ARM64 is immature as hell.
No, but the threat of switching will provide that extra minute push to ensure Intel's continued refinement of Atom chips, and perhaps force them to release subsequent generations a year or two sooner than otherwise. Now that MS is actively promoting ARM-based tablets, Intel should be worried if not outright scared.
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There is. The fact that ARM architechtule an order of magnitude or more behind the current x86 generation in terms of performance is a technical issue, and ARM is clearly having issues making its chips scale in speed without completely losing whatever advantage it has in low power. Hence all the talk about dark silicone in ARM world.
It is not clear that they can beat future Intel CPUs on power usage, especially since Intel's manufacturing process leads the industry by a significant margin.
Everybody says that, but it's only true for the high performance / high power consumption process variant. It's not true for the lower power variant(s), which have some differences and are more tricky than the high perf ones (I'm not an expert on this but one issue for example is that LP needs larger wires to reduce resistance and power consumption. This requires in turn more precision to avoid shorts between wires. People who know more on this topic, please share. It's important to understand how the race can turn in the low power area). For low power Atom chips Intel is right now on 32 nm, while TSMC has been on 28 nm for a while now. It's a one year and half-node advantage for TSMC clients. And Samsung is also now on 32 nm (par). Intel announced they will speed up the availability of new finer processes for low power in the future, but based on their respective announcements Intel and TSMC would be on par for LP (we'll have to see how this turns out in practice...). This means that ARM clients can have a competitive process in the low power space today, and possibly tomorrow. It's likely that ARM clients would focus on many cores / low power servers for I/O bounds loads. They can be competitive there, and gain a foothold. Going to higher single thread performance can come later, it would be hard to attack Intel there in the short / medium term anyway. If you pick a fight, pick one you can win. And the ARM world has more experience in LP.
An order of magnitude behind? No. A15 is close to Pentium M in terms of IPC. It should be around half way to Ivy Bridge IPC, I would think. That's not an order of magnitude, unless you're counting in base 2.
It depends entirely on the application. For heavy maths processing in games or Photoshop ARM is way behind, but for typical server applications it is fairly competitive. Being low power is a huge advantage in datacentres and you often get better performance by having more cores than you do by having fewer faster cores.
Look at graphics cards. Lots of small, simple and not even terribly fast cores (in terms of clock speed). For that application they blow any CPU away. Now look at a typical server and you will see that it already has lots of small, simple and relatively slow cores dedicated to things like TCP/IP offloading, RAID array control and SSD management.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I just got an email from Samsung at the beginning of this week asking me to apply for a job in Dallas, TX. They are looking for an ARM Server hardware/software development team. They sent me the software job description and it looks like they want people who can tweak some firmware and perhaps even tinker with the Linux kernel. Looked like a great job but they require an MS in CS/CE and prefer PH Ds. I don't know why they even bothered emailing me. They have my resume and I clearly do not have a masters.
You just compared a non-released chip from 2012 that is yet to be seen in any real life applications to a mobile x86 chip from 2003, and still didn't even get parity.
Half way to chip tech from 2012? Are you sure you want to lock that answer?
I look at the raspberry pi at $25 and think that would make an OK server. So a slightly upgraded pi with a good arm processor and say 4-8G of memory would be an awesome server as part of a cluster. For many servers in clusters a bit of storage is needed for boot up; the data mostly stays in ram. Then all that would be needed would be the occasional more traditional machine for HD storage. It would be killer to be able to keep adding new little servers for $99.
10 machines with say 4 cores each and 4G each would give a cluster with 40 cores and 35 gigs of in ram storage; all for around $1000. Plus anything by ARM would probably be pretty good efficiency-wise.
Due to redundancy and the extreme capacity adding flexibility I would much prefer $99 machines to just a boring regular server with just an big old ARM chip. Or even a boring regular server with a pile of ARM chips.