
Qualcomm enters server CPU market with 24-core ARM chip - stefantalpalaru
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2990868/qualcomm-enters-server-cpu-market-with-24-core-arm-chip.html
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protomyth
So, where can one buy a 64-bit ARM motherboard with ECC memory slots at a
price around an Intel / AMD offering? I keep seeing these announcements but
not the corresponding competition to Intel / AMD motherboards.

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PedroBatista
Nowhere, and that's the problem.

This kind of announcements have been going on and on for years, but I can't
still get a motherboard where I can plug 2 SATA drives, let alone anything
resembling a low-end Intel board.

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jeswin
Intel's real problem isn't the power efficiency of ARM CPUs, but rather the
entire CPU industry becoming a high-volume, low-margin business.

Currently none except Intel (and well AMD) can make chips for the
Server/Datacenter business, and they get to keep the healthy margins. If ARM
gets into the Datacenter, expect Chinese manufacturers to put out slightly
less efficient, but perfectly capable CPUs for a fraction of the cost. The
death of the x86 cartel is a good thing for customers.

~~~
dogma1138
AMD is fabless they already are using other manufacturers to build their CPU's
and GPU's. Intel is the only one who's currently both designs and manufactures
all of their components.

As for the Chinese fabs, there aren't that many Chinese manufacturers that can
produce an ARM SOC at this moment, the only one of note is MediaTek (And while
they are cheap, they aren't that cheap to cause any major issues), you can't
just copy a CPU easily, it's not like you can buy a full blown functional
reference design from ARM that will be commercially viable you actually need
to develop it yourself (especially considering that you need quite a bit of
stuff in the SOC that ARM doesn't cover). If you look at the current ARM SOC's
even if they are based on the same ARM architecture they are virtually nothing
alike.

And it's not like Intel didn't had (Acer, SiS, NEC, UMC, IBM, National
Semiconductors, NexGen, Transmeta, fuck the 90's to early/mid 2000's were
filled with x86 knockoffs) or has competition in the x86 arena from Chinese
(And non-Chinese) companies heck VIA is still making cheap X86 CPU's many of
them are very low power (watt per watt until the new Core-M stuff some would
actually out-perform intel in some cases) the problem is that all of them are
kinda crap, and most importantly don't have a well established ecosystem
(interconnect-buses, chipsets, memory controllers etc.) and outside of cheap
embedded systems (or 20$ 7" "netbooks" from DealExtreme or Alibaba) you won't
see them anywhere.

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userbinator
_the problem is that all of them are kinda crap, and most importantly don 't
have a well established ecosystem_

I'd say performance was the more important factor, as most of the early non-
Intel x86 were physically compatible (drop-in replacements) - and many were
actually faster than Intel's CPUs, but Intel (and to some extent AMD) quickly
caught up and passed them. The P6 (Pentium Pro/II/III) is when Intel really
started pulling away from the rest.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatibl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatible_processor_manufacturers)

Note: MediaTek is Taiwanese and also fabless. Their phone SoCs are nowhere
near as performant as Qualcomm's or Samsung's, and largely viewed as the low-
cost "value" option.

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dogma1138
As far as the x86 goes if you count the original 486/386 family then yeah, but
ever since the Pentium only AMD could some what compete with Intel the
performance arena.

I remember having to get a non-Intel 486 CPU that would plug into a daughter
board that would sit in the original socket and it was some what faster than
the 486DX that it replaced.

And yes I am very well that MediaTek is fabless and they cannot compete with
QC as far as it comes to performance but they aren't dirt cheap either, and
some of their newer SOC's are actually quite decent. They are however pretty
much the only example of an established "Chinese" (Lets not get political here
because people don't really differentiate between Taiwan and China when it
comes to manufacturing, and most Taiwanese companies these days will actually
manufacture in China because it's cheaper) ARM manufacturer I haven't seen any
other one that can design their own SOC's that would actually work well and be
commercially viable even for global products.

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solnyshok
do you think Samsung can enter this market? they have Exynos for mobiles
already.

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dogma1138
The question if they want too, they'll not only have to design a CPU but an
entire eco-system around it.

I personally see ARM becoming a potential player through another vector.

We already have various "open-cloud" alliances that design their own reference
servers, network equipment and storage.

As ARM being a relatively easy ISA to license it wouldn't surprise me if the
likes of Google and Facebook would license it them selves and then come out
with their open server architecture which will include an ARM based CPU.

Facebook has released their ethernet switches and server reference designs a
while ago, HP has only recently released OpenSwitch which is opensource OS for
networking devices, Intel is also getting into the game with their own echo
system "Intel Open Network Platform".

To me this form of market penetration seems to be much likely than a slow
attempt to creep into the market and in one form or another is pretty much
mandatory current datacenter users to switch to ARM en masse. Especially
considering just how fragmented the ARM market is, there are allot of
different ARM ISA's and even more implementations of those ISA's which aren't
necessarily directly compatible.

If we take Exynos as an example then the custom ARM cores that Samsung
developed caused quite a bit of software compatibility issue which is one of
the reasons why Exynos devices aren't that popular in the Android development
community. Heck it was even an issue for 1st party Samsung software anything
that didn't run in a VM had to be compiled/redeveloped for Exynos which meant
that even software like Samsung GearVR didn't work on Exynos devices
initially.

Which is precisely why i think that a uniform compatible ISA and design from
an investment consortium is required for ARM to work out it's kinks and take
on the server market. Anything that was compiled for x86 for the past what 30
years will work on Intel's current CPU lines. Yes newer CPU's with additional
features, extended instruction sets and their respective supported compilers
will enable you to run you software more efficiently if you want to invest
additional development resources, but if we talk about low level programming
the same cannot be said for ARM in all cases which is a big issue at least as
I see it.

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samfisher83
Qcom should really split into two companies. A majority of their profits come
from their very high margin IP business. I don't see the point of trying to
get into these low margin businesses.

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RyJones
After working there for a couple of years, I describe Qualcomm to outsiders as
a flotilla of IP lawyers that happen to employ a handful of engineers.

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bestusername111
Lol. A single x86 core probably outguns 6 of these cores. I'd rather have a
quad core x86 that is actually useful and runs popular software.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
A large number of cores on a single chip is interesting to us programmers not
just for the overall performance, but for testing software parallelization
strategies.

Low per-core performance is actually a good incentive to parallelize as much
as possible.

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digi_owl
The images of the thing held reminds me of that beast of a CPU that Sun was
making at one point.

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pcunite
Whoever gets to "1Ghz per user" in the cloud first, wins.

Reason: with the future being a socket per user over which the HTML5 interface
is streamed, the user experience can be speedy if that same socket has a
dedicated core too. I really want 2Ghz per user, but let's not be greedy.

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dogma1138
1Ghz is a meaningless number I assume you base it on current IPC performance
of desktop CPU's which is completely irrelevant.

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pcunite
Just trying to represent time.

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dogma1138
Still not sure what are you getting at. If your proposed system is basically a
time-sharing system which thin-clients connect too then it's performance needs
to be similar to what currently individual desktops would need.

If all of the processing isn't done on your system (e.g. 3rd party could like
Office 365, or in your own desktop e.g. Desktop Office) then why would you
need it in the first place?

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mtgx
I assume it will be using the new Kryo core (or whatever hey are calling it).
Hopefully it will be a 14nm chip, too. Things should get interesting for ARM
in the server market if that's the case.

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rasz_pl
24 cores, now compare that to AMDs pitiful attempt at ARM with 2-4 core chips.
Its like AMD is actively trying to go belly up.

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dogma1138
Qualcomm has 20-25 years of experience with designing ARM processors over AMD,
for all of the reasons why AMD will belly up their attempts at getting into
the ARM market isn't one of them.

