Aaron Spink (aaronspink.delete@this.notearthlink.net) on January 22, 2017 12:03 pm wrote:
> RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on January 22, 2017 7:54 am wrote:
> >
> > I'm agnostic about whether ARM has a chance in some parts of the scientific computing market,
> > but I do know that people in that business are very willing to expend software effort to tune their
> > critical code for a hardware platform with good price/performance, so weakness of the ARM software
> > ecosystem would be less of an obstacle there than in the normal server market. And the huge market
> > for phone/tablet ARM-based SoCs with low power and integrated GPU's means that a good deal of the
> > relevant hardware design is already off-the-shelf (the big weakness being the lack of a decent
> > interconnect fabric, but some of the ARM server efforts have tried to address that).
> >
>
> Problem with the phone/tablet SoCs is you are going to have to run at least twice. I'm not
> aware of a single phone soc with even minimal support for ECC memory. Beyond that, you have
> the myriad issues of memory capacity, interconnect, etc. Not really a viable direction.
> The needs for an HPC server simply add cost and power to the phone/tablet SoC market.

I'm not sure what "Problem with the phone/tablet SoCs is you are going to have to run at least twice." means. Every ARM designed core has ECC support as an option as far as I'm aware, even the A73 which is specifically for phones rather than mission critical or server applications.