More on Multi-core

"A few weeks back, I discussed the possibility of cell phone clusters. While cell phone processors continue to get faster, there are other issues that make them a poor platform for traditional HPC. As I mentioned, there are other "crowd sourcing" possibilities that may have some interesting applications for clusters of smart phones. Recently, Samsung announced the first dual core smart phone using the ARM Cortex-A9 Processor. The Cortex-A9 used by Samsung runs at 1 GHz. For an old timer like myself, that is amazing. My first cluster used 450MHz dual core processors.

"The A9 is interesting, but the quad-core A15 is going to get ARM out of phones and into tablets and servers. Including things like double-precision floating-point, vector extensions, 1TB main memory, and ECC cache are not phone features (yet). I had written previously about low power server processors (Intel Atom) and HPC. There are issues of scalability, which comes down to the interconnect, but in general, the "low processors" (low meaning low power, low heat, low cost) may have a play in HPC."

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