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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