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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/O bound servers, where a more powerful CPU would be mostly idle anyway.
Web hosting, data warehousing, networking infrastructure, and the like do fall that way pretty often, though obviously there are exceptions.
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!
Re why is everyone jumping on this bandwagon?
Think of the colourful charts - a new vision of fast ssd's, new ARM, new streamlined code and huge drops in power costs* when doing some types of math and not using HD's.
Find some art of a smiling admin and photoshop it all together.
Invite managers to lunch and sell them the low power, always on, expandable, low cost, union free remote admin upgrade, effortless cloud future - now at a super low price if you sign up today.
Then up sell the users on your green server, green power supply and find some art of a happy polar bear.
Its like selling powerpc to the young and dumb all over again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I/O bound servers, where a more powerful CPU would be mostly idle anyway.
Didn't we invent SSDs to fix that...?
No sig today...
* DNS servers (if you aren't virtualizing stuff)
* email servers (if your spam scanning is external)
* some database servers (generally io bound not cpu bound, tho it of course depends on the nature of the queries)
* simple web hosting (stuff like a CDN serving static files needs almost no CPU)
* monitoring servers
* Camera/surveillance servers (video processing is mostly done by dedicated chips on capture cards)
Really, most servers are not CPU bound these days and would probably benefit from many low-clocked cores than few high-clocked ones. They are exceptions of course, that is why we have super-computers at the other extreme.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
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
The I/O limit could be on memory. Servers can have >1000 times more RAM than there is cache on a CPU chip. With enough threads and/or processor cores the cache hit rate drops, so that the memory bus is 100% busy. At that point a faster CPU gives no benefit, may as well us a low-power one.
"Slapping people is fun." - Starla Grady
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.