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We've also looked at data science to solve the problem but found that a traditional approach still offers the best performance.


Can you define "traditional approach" please? :) What do you mean specifically?


This gives a comparison between various developers of routing software, including Ocado https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608640/inside-the-increas...


No, that is not the primary purpose. I've called out products related to Imagination five times (and all of them in block diagram/images used to illustrate practical examples) in an article of 1,300 words.


I've tried to break down the different IoT categories and identify generic characteristics that apply to them. There are of course hundreds of specific SoCs to choose from but they all typically fall under one of the five categories I've mentioned.

High-density compute nodes are a specific type of processors that have manycore CPUs. The reason they are called high-density is because they pack tens or hundreds of small CPU cores onto a single die. These types of small cores don't provide massive single-threaded performance by themselves but when added together, they can be quite compelling. This is a different approach to having a few but very powerful cores such as Intel Xeons on an SoC. An analogy would be a flock of starlings versus an eagle. Moreover, many CPU designers today have abandoned the practice of scaling in frequency to achieve performance and are focused more and more on performance per watt (hence the term green computing). This is because the costs associated with powering and cooling a data center are rapidly rising.


> This is because the costs associated with powering and cooling a data center are rapidly rising.

Because when I think "IoT", the first place I think of is a datacenter...


You might not, but where do you think the vast amount of data produced by IoT devices is going to go?


Somewhere other than an IoT device?


It usually goes like IoT device - gateway - data center. IoT devices are having a massive impact on data center architectures.


So any processor that ever touches data that came from an IoT device is an "IoT processor"?


I would agree that data center processors are not IoT processors. They're generic, server processors.

IoT == "connected devices"... with the emphasis on devices. i.e. embedded microcontrollers.

Also note that they themselves don't have to be packaged with some RF comms, plain old microcontrollers are entirely suitable for most cases.


> There are of course hundreds of specific SoCs to choose from but they all typically fall under one of the five categories I've mentioned.

Exactly why a guide would be useful to help understand the tradeoffs... which this guide does not supply.


Yes, but Vulkan will change that since it is an API designed for graphics and compute.


My focus was on mobile, not desktop GPUs. However, I've noticed that energy and area efficiency are starting to become more relevant in desktop too.

At the end of the day, I guess it's all about finding the right balance for your target application.


Allow me to refresh your memory then. How does the following sound to you?

"We also support Full Profile and 64-bit natively, in hardware. After years of evangelising the benefits of such an approach it is nice to see other players in the industry join down this avenue." https://community.arm.com/groups/arm-mali-graphics/blog/2013...

"Mali-T622 was specifically tailored for this job. Mali-T622 also supports OpenCL Full Profile and includes double-precision FP64 and full IEEE-754-2008 floating-point support which are essential features in order to enhance the user experience" https://community.arm.com/groups/arm-mali-graphics/blog/2013...

I could go on with the examples but I think there's no need to spam the thread with tens of blog articles that say FP64 and "native 64-bit" (whatever that means) are essential to the mobile experience.



You can have a look at www.imgtec.com/vulkan for some example code. You can also download the latest Vulkan driver for the Nexus Player.



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