Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 9, 2014 12:38 pm wrote:
> anon (no.delete@this.thank.you) on August 9, 2014 10:17 am wrote:
> > juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on August 9, 2014 6:43 am wrote:
> > > Aaron Spink (aaronspink.delete@this.notearthlink.net) on August 9, 2014 3:44 am wrote:
> > > > juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on August 8, 2014 10:49 am wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Take a modern A57 core. According to AMD the A57 Opteron is faster than jaguar based Opteron but
> > > > > consumes less power. The ARM core performance is ~40% faster, and consumes roughly one half.
> > > > >
> > > > Faster at what? Its a bunch of market point pointing to nothingness.
> > >
> > > SPECint
> > >
> >
> > Could you provide a link for this?
>
> I can believe it. Jaguar is low-power low-frequency design with comfort zone around 1.5 GHz.
> If you take Jaguar to 2GHz (as in Opterons) it is very probable that
> it's going to lose to A57 both in power and in performance.
> That's why AMD builds overwhelming majority of their Opterons around Buldozer and Piledriver cores now and
> likely going to migrate to Steamroller in the near future. If I am not mistaken, out of dozens of Opteron
> models only 2 are based on Jaguar, i.e. even less that there are Xeon models based on Silvermont.
> And their main selling point of Jaguar-based Opterons is
> low price rather than high performance or low power.
> In fact, power-wise Jaguar-based Opterons are pretty uninteresting - 17W for
> quad-core GPU-less 2 GHz part. For comparison, Intel Avoton has 20 W octacore
> at 2.4 GHz. But the later costs (list) $171 while the former only $64.
>
> Still, although I believe it, I'd really like to see published SPECInt
> numbers for ARM-based Opterons instead of internal lab estimates.
>

Umm....still this claim "half the power" seems a little out of realty.
We have an eight A57 cores AMD A1100 at 25W@2Ghz, halving the cores we have a 15W thing (the uncore has its weight even with less cores). About performance, at the same clock speed the +40% is even less credible looking at ARM Spec estimates for A57.
No these are crap numbers without any lab proof.

I think that AMD is going with ARM because it's more easy to assembly a scalable server cpu thanks to the ARM uncore IP. AMD has not resources to develop 16 or 32 cores SKUs, they need of a brand new scalable on die connection fabric that they have not now.
Unfortunately ARM uncore IP does not seems the best around, looking the better performance/power of Avoton.
ARM has a lot of work to do to compete, they are only at the beginning.