dmcq (dmcq.delete@this.fano.co.uk) on January 22, 2017 1:03 pm wrote:
> 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.

ARM designed cores have support for ECC. Phone/tablet SoCs built around ARM designed cores do not.
And ARM's main advantage - economy of scale - is far more important at the level of SoCs than at the level of cores.
Take, for example, TI Keystone-II series. It is based on ARM Cortex A15 core and it supports ECC. But not being phone SoCs, their price/performance is not attractive, unless you are specifically interested in DSP part of the chip.

May be, price/perf of Freescale NXP Qualcomm LS2088A will be more attractive when it becomes less new.