HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
We hardly have to feel bad for Arm, it’s not like it doesn’t own the entire mobile phone and tablet space. In fact, if things weren’t already looking a bit grim for Intel on the desktop and laptop front, consider that its cash cow of the server market is now under attack by not just a revitalised AMD but by Arm as well. For decades, server farms have grappled with the issue that cooling costs more than running the damn servers – two to one back in the day, even now one to one costs are a mark of a good cooling design. So, if someone appears, offering a way of reducing the power consumption of your servers, you’re going to pay attention. That’s exactly what Arm has been busy doing.
You might have heard of Amazon and its Amazon Web Services that run half the web. With so much bare metal to pay for, anything that saves energy benefits Amazon. So, it designed its own server processor core called Graviton, and in May 2022 it released Graviton3. It’s a 64-core ARMv8.4 SoC with 64MB of L3 cache, running at 2.6GHz with 8-channel DDR5 memory and PCIe 5 on the 5nm TSMC process. Serious stuff.
MOS 6502
No one would have believed in the last years of the 20th century that the processor world was being watched keenly and N closely by intelligences greater than Intel’s. Yet across the gulf of the Atlantic in a country called the UK, intellects vast and cool regarded the processor market with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against Intel…
Estimates put power use at 100W versus 300W for a similarly pegged Xeon.