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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!
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.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because "we require" rarely means "we won't touch you with a bargepole unless you have". It's there to weed out the chaff who think they're not good enough or important enough to apply.
I've applied for numerous jobs that have "required" things like MCSE's and A+, and first-class degrees and I clearly state that I don't have them, but what I do have is X amount of experience doing Y.
The bright employers (i.e. the only type you *want* to work for anyway) pick it up and say "Oh, right, he's probably spent so long DOING the job, he never got around to paying the certification tax on a bit of paper to say he could do it." or "He was out earning a wage in this sector while our own guys were still in university playing with microcontrollers". The bad ones, of course, shove it off and it gets lost in the HR department because it "doesn't meet criteria".
I've also advised people to ignore this sort of thing in the past, so long as you *CAN* put forward a reasonable case of being suitable for the job anyway, and it's never perfect (there is no magic way to get a job) but it's helped a lot of them to get positions they didn't think they were good enough for. How many of the industry founding fathers and visionaries had PhD's or Masters? Nowhere near all, and they still got there.
Don't blatantly ignore high requirements, just substitute what you have instead (and, if you like, in your covering letter explain that: "Although I notice that the job requirements include X, I feel that my extensive expertise in position Y performing task Z should be sufficient to prove that I'm capable of performing to the standards required") if you think you have a shot of doing the JOB.
Applications processes are mainly about weeding out the vast number of applicants, but secondarily they are about YOU weeding out the vast number of jobs available. Because if your employer can't see that you can do the job, just because you have an absence of certain desired letters after your name, you probably don't want to work there anyway (and they probably will ignore your application, but the chances that they veto you for future posts because of your politely-worded ambition are vanishingly small... and again, those sort of people you just don't want to work for anyway).
That may be *why* they bothered emailing everyone. Because they aren't just interested in PhD's, but they just want a high standard of applicant. One who has those qualifications, or one who has the skills and knows how to get through a job application process by playing on them.
The worst that happens is they say No, and keep your information on file for future reference. The chances it will prejudice any future applications - a concern I've heard from the people I've given personal advice - are basically zero (do you really think HR departments keep years and years and years worth of applications that they are already TRYING to narrow down to just a few candidates from thousands and somehow and check them for every post? No.).
And, you never know, they might just say "Well, actually, you're not right for this particular position, but we are just about to advertise for X as well, and that's look more suited to you."
In job-hunting, there's nothing wrong with being ambitious, so long as you're honest. And even if they offer it you and you don't like the idea of working in a crowd full of bitter PhD's, or it's not better than your current job, again - you can so "no" just as easily as they can.