David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on August 13, 2014 1:07 pm wrote:
> juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on August 11, 2014 7:00 pm wrote:
> > David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on August 10, 2014 9:12 pm wrote:
> > > > 20--30% sounds as the right efficiency numbers at that level. Precisely 90W
> > > > ARM SoCs are providing around 80--90% of performance of 140W Haswell Xeons.
> > >
> > > Seriously dude. What 90W ARM server chip is providing performance to customers?
> > >
> > > Let me remind you that server chips must be implemented in
> > > silicon, not power point to provide value to customers.
> > >
> > > And I'm quite willing to bet that no ARM server design in
> > > the next 2-3 years will provide 80% of the performance
> > > of the highest bin Xeon. If they are lucky, they might get to the low-end territory. They probably also
> > > won't have as much memory capacity and generally be inferior across a number of dimensions.
> > >
> > > DK
> >
> > First, you pretended that you didn't hear of any high-performance
> > ARM design, despite many being announced in many places.
> >
> > Then you ignored the specs given to you for one of those designs.
>
> There are a number of companies attempting to design high performance ARM server
> chips. The specs even sound interesting on paper. But in reality, that doesn't
> matter until the products are shipping to customers in general availability.
>
> Design targets are just that - targets. There is no guarantee Broadcom, Applied,
> Cavium, etc. will hit their frequency or power targets. We don't know until the
> chips are generally available in high volume, which won't be for a long time.
>
> Even Applied Micro systems are only available for pre-order right now, and they taped out a long time ago.
>
> In contrast to these 'design targets', Intel is shipping real products in high
> volume today with widely available benchmark data. The two are entirely different
> in terms of credibility, and it's deceptive to think about it otherwise.
>
> Moreover, remember that Intel is a moving target. They are shipping IVB-EP
> right now, and will have HSW-EP next year, and BDW-EP the year after.
>
> David

I agree with all of this David. But this isn't the point.

The point is that when I began mentioning the server-class ARM cores/SoCs, some people here said me that no company had announced high-performance cores; that they never heard about 90W ARM SoC; that ARM couldn't scale up; that I was mentioning waporware because nothing was shipping, and so on. Some people even go further with ad-hominem and fallacies whereas ignoring my arguments, info, and links.

I agree entirely on that Broadcom can claim 90% single thread of Haswell Xeon performance and hit only 75% on final silicon, but then all of us have to wait and see final silicon benchmarked. At this moment I can say that Broadcom claims 90% of single thread performance and nobody would attack me by saying that. At best skeptics would share its skepticism on targets but they wouldn't attack me.

I would add that there is no warranty that Intel, AMD, IBM, or any other company will hit targets either.