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Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

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Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#51

Post by timthorn »

ece wrote: post #46
tonysdg wrote: post #21

I've run experiments/developed on both Applied Micro's X-Gene 1 and Cavium's ThunderX (the original). Both of these have been touted as "ARM servers". The X-Gene was complete crap in terms of both performance and power consumption. The ThunderX was only really useful for highly-parallel applications that don't require a lot of horsepower, and even then it's a power hog. I'm cautiously optimistic with Qualcomm's Centr…

Not to mention the amount of hardware standardization that still needs to happen. Having a different image for each manufacturer's hardware is going to get real old, real fast. 5+ years on, ARM on anywhere but mobile seems like a dud.

You don't need a different image for different manufacturers' platforms. One Linux image works across vendors. The standardisation effort started some years ago resulting in SBSA/SBBR, which allows a common image to be used.

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#52

Post by leohutson »

Cyberdog wrote: post #3

Yesterday: ARM in your phones Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch) Tomorrow: ARM in your servers Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? I, for one, welco…

Someone should make a discrete gpu with an arm cpu core or 50 sharing the same memory and maybe ssd. Then you have a really nice hierarchy of parallelism, 2 fast arm cores, 10 medium, 50 slow, then gpu.

Would be great for stuff like multigrid methods where you are balancing parallelism and latency:

https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-...

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#53

Post by voltagex_ »

timthorn wrote: post #51
ece wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the amount of hardware standardization that still needs to happen. Having a different image for each manufacturer's hardware is going to get real old, real fast. 5+ years on, ARM on anywhere but mobile seems like a dud.

You don't need a different image for different manufacturers' platforms. One Linux image works across vendors. The standardisation effort started some years ago resulting in SBSA/SBBR, which allows a common image to be used.

I really want to see someone attempt an Android Treble-like project for ARM Linux distros.

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#54

Post by frankharv »

ece wrote: post #46
tonysdg wrote: post #21

I've run experiments/developed on both Applied Micro's X-Gene 1 and Cavium's ThunderX (the original). Both of these have been touted as "ARM servers". The X-Gene was complete crap in terms of both performance and power consumption. The ThunderX was only really useful for highly-parallel applications that don't require a lot of horsepower, and even then it's a power hog. I'm cautiously optimistic with Qualcomm's Centr…

Not to mention the amount of hardware standardization that still needs to happen. Having a different image for each manufacturer's hardware is going to get real old, real fast. 5+ years on, ARM on anywhere but mobile seems like a dud.

I just wrote a Device Tree Overlay for a Real Time Clock module on FreeBSD RPI3. There is something to be said for PNP hardware.

Who would imagine that the computer industry would go so far back in time as to leave off the RTC.

Oh but wait they added Bluetooth and Wifi. Yet no system time. Still waiting for a PCIe bus as well... Guess I need some more of that koolaide they are drinking.

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#55

Post by fulafel »

Interesting that the graph shows ICC getting 20% more performnance than GCC - This seems a much bigger difference than normal, as people usually don't find the ICC speedup enough to warrant using. Anyone know if it's a CPU2017 phenomenon, or has ICC recently dramatically improved, or was ICC always 20% faster?

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#56

Post by skykooler »

Cyberdog wrote: post #11
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s... . - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? The current MBP already has ARM: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-ma... But this is similar to ARM (or MIPS or whatever) cores that alre…

I care about performance in my phone too, so where can I buy an Intel phone? The truth is that my phone doesn't have to be the fastest; it just has to be fast enough in balance with other factors important to me (size, battery life, etc). And the same goes with my laptop. I currently have an MBP with an i7 processor, and I'm a web developer - it's overkill. I also play games with it now and then, but it's clear that…

Asus Zenfone smartphones use Intel processors.

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#57

Post by fractalb »

fulafel wrote: post #55

Interesting that the graph shows ICC getting 20% more performnance than GCC - This seems a much bigger difference than normal, as people usually don't find the ICC speedup enough to warrant using. Anyone know if it's a CPU2017 phenomenon, or has ICC recently dramatically improved, or was ICC always 20% faster?

or ICC was optimized for benchmarks

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#58

Post by jabl »

Symmetry wrote: post #35

I'd sort of been expecting that ARM would begin making HPC inroads when SVE[1] was ready to go. But I guess those two Neon units provide enough horsepower? [1] https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/technology...

From a HPC perspective, I think the current crop is interesting mostly [1] for tire kicking, software porting etc. Real production deployments will start to happen once SVE is available.

[1] Though they could be interesting for applications that are memory BW bound and don't vectorize that well.

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#59

Post by fh973 »

Cyberdog wrote: post #3

Yesterday: ARM in your phones Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch) Tomorrow: ARM in your servers Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? I, for one, welco…

Even cheap SD cards have been running on ARM for a while https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

Re: Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender

#60

Post by hawski »

andreiw wrote: post #44
hawski wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next week + 1 day: your laptop is no longer supported Which ARM SoC has mainlined drivers in Linux kernel? I fear that the ARM trend will only help to make the the e-waste mountain higher.

That’s exactly why the Arm servers adopt the same specs or functional equivs to x86. A single binary distribution of an OS will boot on any SBSA compatible machine - because all the weird bits are hidden through ACPI, UEFI and PSCI. No BSPs. I’d go as far as saying Arm servers are compatible to x86 designs at a platform level (eg. how PCIe and config space are wired up, how caches and DMA work, NUMA, SMP, MSI(X), and…

Is there any hope that it could be used to some extent on smartphones? Or maybe there is a similar effort in that space?

I understand that some works may be hard to miniaturize.

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