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Yeah I don't quite get that either. Apparently Marvell thinks that there's a market that's being overlooked for systems with lots of low-power, highly-efficien
by Kadin 16y ago
Yeah I don't quite get that either.
Apparently Marvell thinks that there's a market that's being overlooked for systems with lots of low-power, highly-efficient cores.
I guess I can see how that might work; it would be competing less with big Xeon or Opteron boxes than with blade systems. I've seen companies that for whatever reason are not comfortable with the idea of virtualizing multiple logical servers on one big physical server, but instead have lots of high-density blades. Different way of thinking. Except that many of them are running flavors of Windows on the blades, I could see some sort of ARM SoC based solution having some appeal.
- rbanffy 16y agoLet's say you have a 4-core x86 running 20 processes. Imagine you can have, for a fraction of the operating cost, the same performance out of a 16-core ARM chip. You get a lot more performance per thread on a Xeon/Opteron, but you could get about the same, if not more, aggregate performance from a different chip if you match your processor architecture to the workload. Another example: imagine doing lots of floating-point on x86s compared to doing it on GPUs. Even if GPUs require another processor to control them and keep them busy, the GFLOP per dollar is much more favorable to them. Sun had some interesting numbers on Niagara-baser boxes serving lots of simultaneous requests. Too bad those machines never got the attention they deserved.