• ARM Servers: Qualcomm Is Now A Contender

    August 23, 2017

    Many have tried to wrench the door of the datacenter open with ARM processors, but Qualcomm, which knows a thing or two about creating and selling chips for smartphones and other client devices, has perhaps the best chance of actually selling ARM chips in volume inside of servers.

    The combination of a rich and eager target market with a good product design tailored for that market and enough financial strength and stability to ensure many generations of development are what are necessary to break into the datacenter, and the “Falkor” cores that were unveiled this week at Hot Chips were …

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  • Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC

    June 30, 2017 Jonathan Beard, Roxana Rusitoru

    2011 marked ARM’s first step into the world of HPC with the European Mont-Blanc project. The premise was simple: leverage the energy efficiency of ARM-based mobile designs for high performance computing applications.

    Unfortunately, making the leap from the mobile market to HPC was not an easy feat. Long time players in this space, such as Intel and IBM, hold home field advantage: that of legacy software. HPC-optimized libraries, compilers and applications were already present for these platforms. This was not, however, the case for ARM. Early adopters had to start, largely from scratch, porting and building an ecosystem with a …

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  • Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion

    June 19, 2017

    What goes around comes around. After fighting so hard to drive volume economics in the HPC arena with relatively inexpensive X86 clusters in the past twenty years, those economies of scale are running out of gas. That is why we are seeing an explosion in the diversity of compute, not just on the processor, but in adjunct computing elements that make a processor look smarter than it really is.

    The desire of system architects to try everything because it is fun has to be counterbalanced by a desire to make systems that can be manufactured at a price that is …

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  • Red Hat Is The Gatekeeper For ARM In The Datacenter

    May 5, 2017

    If any new hardware technology is going to get traction in the datacenter, it has to have the software behind it. And as the dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat’s support of ARM-based servers gives the upstart chip makers like Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm the leverage to help pry the glasshouse doors open and get a slice of the server and storage business that is so utterly dominated by Intel’s Xeon processors today.

    It is now or never for ARM in the datacenter, and that means Red Hat has to go all the way and not just support …

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  • ARM Pioneer Sophie Wilson Also Thinks Moore’s Law Coming to an End

    April 13, 2017

    Intel might have its own thoughts about the trajectory of Moore’s Law, but many leaders in the industry have views that variate slightly from the tick-tock we keep hearing about.

    Sophie Wilson, designer of the original Acorn Micro-Computer in the 1970s and later developer of the instruction set for ARM’s low-power processors that have come to dominate the mobile device world has such thoughts. And when Wilson talks about processors and the processor industry, people listen.

    Wilson’s message is essentially that Moore’s Law, which has been the driving force behind chip development in particular and the computer industry …

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  • New ARM Architecture Offers A DynamIQ Response To Compute

    March 21, 2017 Stacey Higginbotham

    ARM has rearchitected its multi-core chips to they can better compete in a world where computing needs are becoming more specialized.

    The new DynamIQ architecture will provide flexible compute, with up to eight different cores in a single cluster on a system on a chip. Each core can run at a different clock speed so a company making an ARM SoC can tailor the silicon to handle multiple workloads at varying power efficiencies. The DynamIQ architecture also adds faster access to accelerators for artificial intelligence or networking jobs, and a resiliency that allows it to be used in robotics, autonomous …

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  • ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack

    March 15, 2017 Darren Cepulis

    The HPC community is trying to solve the critical compute challenges of next generation high performance computing and ARM considers itself well-positioned to act as a catalyst in this regard. Applications like machine learning and scientific computing are driving demands for orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, capability and efficiency to achieve exascale computing for next generation deployments.

    ARM has been taking a co-design approach with the ecosystem from silicon to system design to application development to provide innovative solutions that address this challenge. The recent Allinea acquisition is one example of ARM’s commitment to HPC, but ARM has worked …

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  • Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure

    March 9, 2017

    The rumors have been running around for years, and they turned out to be true. Microsoft, the world’s largest operating system supplier and still the dominant seller of systems software for the datacenter, has indeed been working for years on a port of its Windows Server 2016 operating system to the ARM server chip architecture.

    The rumors about Windows Server on ARM started in earnest back in October 2014, which just before Qualcomm threw its hat into the ARM server ring and when Cavium and Applied Micro were in the market and starting to plan the generation of chips …

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  • Applied Micro Renews ARM Assault On Intel Servers

    March 9, 2017

    The lineup of ARM server chip makers has been a somewhat fluid one over the years.

    There have been some that have come and gone (pioneer Calxeda was among the first to the party but folded in 2013 after running out of money), some that apparently have looked at the battlefield and chose not to fight (Samsung and Broadcom, after its $37 billion merger with Avago), and others that have made the move into the space only to pull back a bit (AMD a year ago released its ARM-based Opteron A1100 systems-on-a-chip, or SOCs but has since shifted most of …

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  • ARM And AMD X86 Server Chips Get Mainstream Lift From Microsoft

    March 8, 2017

    If you want real competition among vendors who supply stuff to you, then sometimes you have to make it happen by yourself. The hyperscalers and big cloud builders of the world can do that, and increasingly they are taking the initiative and fostering such competition for compute.

    With its first generation of Open Cloud Servers, which were conceptualized in 2012, put into production for its Azure public cloud in early 2013, and open sourced through the Open Compute Project in January 2014, Microsoft decided to leverage the power of the open source hardware community to make its own server …

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