ARM Announces 64-Bit Cortex-A50 Architecture 160
MojoKid writes "ARM debuted its new 64-bit microarchitecture today and announced the upcoming launch of a new set of Cortex processors, due in 2014. The two new chip architectures, dubbed the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57, are the most advanced CPUs the British company has ever built, and are integral to AMD's plans to drive dense server applications beginning in 2014. The new ARMv8 architecture adds 64-bit memory addressing, increases the number of general purpose registers to 30, and increases the size of the vector registers for NEON/SIMD operations. The Cortex-A57 and A-53 are both aimed at the mobile market. Partners that've already signed on to build ARMv8-based hardware include Samsung, AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, and STMicro."
The 64-bit ARM ISA is pretty interesting: it's more of wholesale overhaul than a set of additions to the 32-bit ISA.
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at the article in detail. Isn't it funny how the A-15 is the super-miracle chip that is going to stick it to Intel in the server world! Oh wait.. now that super-miracle chip is the 64-bit ARM Miracle Chip (TM) and the A-15 has been relegated to smartphones instead of taking over the server world.
Fortunately, Intel is completely incapable of making any improvements to its chips whatsoever, so ARM's victory in 2014 is assured.
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, ARM designs the IPs that will go into those products... and they are ready to start selling the IP. It takes a couple of years to build SOCs around them, and then to build the devices.
ARM is selling their product now, their customers will announce their products when they are ready. You can't expect them to keep quiet about what they're trying to sell until it's in an actual phone.
Re:This is why we need AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
A world with AMD is also one that uses ARM as a DRM bludgeon [slashdot.org]. I'm not sure we need that sort of competition.
Re:This is why we need AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno, considering the budget they are working with I'd say getting performance even in the same ballpark as Intel is pretty impressive, especially once you factor in that they are a full process node behind at the fabs. Their multi-threaded top-end speed is the same or faster than Intel, it's only in IPC that they are still behind. Their performance/$ is tied or better.
Re:This is why we need AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
So you're posting this from a Itanium box, right?
Wait, so you got a 64 bit x86 CPU... what was that ISA called again?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:3, Insightful)
Smartphones with >4GB are not that far off. There are a couple of 2GB phones already.
So it's likely that Android will have 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland before long.
Though you can probably kludge it with something like PAE - i.e. a 32 bit kernel with >32bits of address space.
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:5, Insightful)
Concur. ARM is fucked, it's funny people don't see that. They will move back to basically providing only ultra low cost and ultra low power chips. They will see their high end aspirations kicked to the ground, and will be pushed lower and lower in the tablet and mobile phone market over the next 2 years.
ARM's core business is processor cores — CPU layouts to laymen — that other companies can take and add their own extra bits to before manufacturing. It's called System-on-Chip (SOC) and it's an area where Intel doesn't have much of a grasp precisely because it involves giving your design to other companies, letting them modify it by adding stuff, and then manufacture it themselves (or through a third-party). Now, it's hardly surprising that the high-end SOC guys want a larger addressing mode; the forces which pushed desktops also push mobile devices and the like.
What amuses me is the push to e.g. servers. Gee, can I get a server with 1000 cores that's slower in almost every operation than a 16 core Xeon server? Oh, and can you make it useless for virtualizing servers or doing anything but light load trivially parallelizable tasks?
I know a few scientists with tasks to do that are embarrassingly parallel and with far more data than you can shake a whole bushel of sticks at. Being able to stuff even more cores into a rack (where power and cooling are usually the main constraints) is going to be of great interest to them. Whether it will beat out GPUs is the real question though. I expect it will for some workloads (ones with more complex conditional processing in the individual units of processing) but not others. And Intel remains the fastest situations where raw single-threaded power is required, which frankly is a lot of code.
Supercomputing doesn't operate under the same constraints that desktop or normal server computing does. Supercomputer makers try to pack as much computing power in as small a space as possible (because delays effectively due to the speed of light are quite a significant problem otherwise). All too often, the main challenge with a supercomputer is stopping it from cooking itself and setting fire to the building...
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think ARM is very safe in mobile devices. It's low power consumption most ARM chipsets have video acceleration, so it can still play HD video. It's licensable too, which is handy for SoCs. Also the cores are tiny.
Moving to Atom would give phones more CPU power but I'm not convinced there is much need for it. I've got an Samsung Galaxy S2 and it's not like there is anything I do that is CPU bound. Smartphones have poor battery life already though, and a move to x86 is going to make that worse.
Now Intel are talking about licensing Atom, but I think they face an uphill battle. ARM's mix of low thermal power/low CPU power compared to x86 and small licensable cores aimed at TSMC is basically ideal for people like Samsung, Qualcomm and so on. In fact Qualcomm have spent a lot of money developing their own microarchitecture for ARM - the Snapdragon and Krait cores. If they moved to x86 they would not be able to do that. NVidia are obviously graphics focussed. So it's hard to see the ARM SoC vendors switching to Intel.
Of course Intel is safe in servers and laptops because there you do need x86 compatibility and more horsepower even at the cost of a higher power consumption.
Re:Time to learn.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay Cortex A-15! (Score:2, Insightful)
Its a hell of a lot easier for Intel, who already has insane levels of IPC, to scale down and have low power chips than it is for ARM to scale up and not blow their power budgets
[Citation required]
Intel have insane levels of IPC because they use insane amounts of power. IPC and power are correlated, yeah? It takes power to run all those parallel circuits that can look ahead in the instruction stream and provide high IPC. The laws of physics work the same way for Intel as they do for ARM. So, why is it easier to scale down than scale up? ARM's major advantage is they don't have to spend power decoding the x86 instruction set. Unless Intel are proposing a new ISA, which they're not, they are always going to have lower feasible performance per Watt. Basic physics. And performance per Watt is what matters on mobile, not IPC. The funny thing is, this is beginning to matter in the server space too. So far from Intel significantly eating into ARM's mobile market, ARM are going to start eating into Intel's server market. For desktops, IPC is way more important than performance per Watt, so Intel are safe for the foreseeable future.
As for "dark silicon", that's Intel main trick for reducing power consumption, so it's a funny argument to make against ARM.