
Is ARM Hungry Enough to Eat Intel's Favorite Pie? - signa11
http://blosc.org/posts/arm-memory-walls-followup/
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imtringued
I remember when Microsoft announced Windows on Arm 2 years ago. Now in 2019
they still haven't delivered. I couldn't care less about performance because
there are no ARM products on the market that are actually interesting to early
adopters. Even if we take alternative routes that weren't intended for
mainstream customers, for example arm SBCs. After 2 years literally only the
RK3399 SoC which was basically intended for chromebooks anyway, so ARM
contributed 0% to it's success, has actually offered extremely basic features
like PCIe. But thanks to the raspberry pi monoculture nobody is working on
things like GPU drivers or better software support for SBCs anyway. Your
crappy A11X or whatever with nice artifcal benchmark scores doesn't interest
me. It's a shut in that can't communicate with the outside world and barely
competes with an obsolete i5 3540 from 2012.

There is a reason nothing happens and it's because most companies don't care
about ARM in the server space at all (including ARM themselves), they only
want to use it to negotiate better discounts with intel. So far Google is the
only company that has ARM based computers.

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saagarjha
> A11X or whatever with nice artifcal benchmark scores doesn't interest me.
> It's a shut in that can't communicate with the outside world and barely
> competes with an obsolete i5 3540 from 2012.

A12X (there is no A11X) is only "shut in" because it runs iOS. Other than
that, it's similar in power to the chips in MacBooks.

~~~
ken
That's a pretty big shut-in. Unless you're going to run a server farm full of
iPads, it's useless to anyone outside of Apple.

~~~
saagarjha
The chips in iPads are thermally constrained, so they would not do well in
continuous loads. But if Apple were to ship an ARM Mac with a good TDP, this
might change.

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sliken
Keep in mind these benchmarks are against a 4 watt CPU (Huawei's Kirin 980)
with no air cooling inside a phone. Doesn't seem particularly fair to compare
against a 28 watt core i5 with active cooling.

The more interesting comparison would be to the Huawei 7nm server CPU with 8
memory channels, 2x10G, and 64 cores.

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vardump
Regarding that benchmark... so blosc2 and lz4 compression? Both can benefit
from SIMD.

I wonder how well optimized those ARM versions are they're using. Do they even
use NEON? Pretty likely x86 versions use SSE2 or AVX2.

So is that really a CPU performance benchmark or blosc2 and LZ4 library
implementation quality benchmark?

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crb002
As soon as AWS offers ARM Lambda instances I'll probably use them. Once
commodity it's price for integer compute. Floating point may take longer to
port everything.

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qlk1123
A informative report. Would be better if there were some comparisons based on
energy consumption.

