By: Ronald Maas (rmaas.delete@this.wiwo.nl), November 10, 2014 7:09 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on November 10, 2014 8:00 am wrote:
> David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on November 9, 2014 2:43 pm wrote:
>
> > I really don't see HPC as being vulnerable at all. Single core performance matters,
> > and there's a lot of ecosystem (e.g., infiniband) that just isn't there for ARM.
>
> Supercomputing with commodity CPUs: are mobile SoCs ready for HPC?
>
> gives beautiful graphics with the performance evolution of vector processors vs alpha/HP-PA/IBM...
> vs x86 and vs ARM-based processors. The replaced processors always began at higher performance
> levels but are replaced by processors that are characterized by faster evolution, closing the performance
> gap very fast. The faster evolution has its roots on a larger volume sales [#].
>
I do see the benefits of combining ARM cores with GPUs, as long as all FP calculations can be done on the GPU side. But not sure if ARM will ever be an attractive option for any HPC solution that depend on CPUs exclusively to do all the heavy lifting.
Reason is I think a difference in philosophy. Intel tries to be good in everything. ARM community tries to excel only in certain areas - high volume, cost, energy and size reduction, etc. And developing very high performance DP FP capabilities, like Intel's AVX-512, does not fit this picture.
Ronald
> David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on November 9, 2014 2:43 pm wrote:
>
> > I really don't see HPC as being vulnerable at all. Single core performance matters,
> > and there's a lot of ecosystem (e.g., infiniband) that just isn't there for ARM.
>
> Supercomputing with commodity CPUs: are mobile SoCs ready for HPC?
>
> gives beautiful graphics with the performance evolution of vector processors vs alpha/HP-PA/IBM...
> vs x86 and vs ARM-based processors. The replaced processors always began at higher performance
> levels but are replaced by processors that are characterized by faster evolution, closing the performance
> gap very fast. The faster evolution has its roots on a larger volume sales [#].
>
I do see the benefits of combining ARM cores with GPUs, as long as all FP calculations can be done on the GPU side. But not sure if ARM will ever be an attractive option for any HPC solution that depend on CPUs exclusively to do all the heavy lifting.
Reason is I think a difference in philosophy. Intel tries to be good in everything. ARM community tries to excel only in certain areas - high volume, cost, energy and size reduction, etc. And developing very high performance DP FP capabilities, like Intel's AVX-512, does not fit this picture.
Ronald
