Submitted by “While Intel may already be worried about ever gaining a foothold in the mobile chip market. ARM is starting to push into the high-end server market too with news of a 480-core, low power server in the works. The company behind the new server is a data center startup called Calxeda. Its focus is on building a processor platform that will have a significant impact on IT costs and energy consumption. They go so far as to claim a factor of 10 reduction in costs and a 5x, or even 10x performance gain over what is currently available.”
I remember the claims of ADSL2+ being 24Mbps….
Feeding 400+ processors with enough data so they won’t idle seems like a rather tough task to deal with. That motherboard must be loaded with pretty much nothing but system buses, and plenty of them!
Well, I guess that would depend on the throughput of the whole system. If 480 ARM processors are only as fast as a handful of x86 cores, your memory bandwidth should prove no more a bottleneck. The article is sadly lacking on details such as clock speed, etc.
The nice thing about it is that it would offer a great deal of flexibility depending on how parallelizable your code is. Nobody’s claiming you have to use all 480 cores at the same time; you could turn off half or more of them if that’s all you can use, if your memory bus proves inadequate for your current task.
do these things come with an IOMMU?
As always, the question is how many SMP (if any) separate nodes will be used to construct this beast and which type of interconnect will be used to connect the different nodes.
480 cores might seem cool, but if its composed of 120 quad core nodes with a slow 1GbE interconnect, this machine will be limited to niche markets.
– Gilboa