Wednesday, March 16, 2011

480 cores in a 2U

A few weeks ago we told you about a server-based Atom that contained 512 cores (1024 threads) in a 10U server. The company Calxeda specializing in ARM chips, plans to do better: 480 cores in a 2U server. Calxeda is a company founded in 2008 which decided to offer ARM chips in servers. The advantage is obvious: the amount of energy consumed is very low with ARM SoC and it is a huge advantage for servers and storage for everything that does not require enormous computing power.

Calxeda should offer ultimately a SoC ARM Cortex A9 integrating four cores and capable of high speed interconnect with other SoC. With an average consumption of 5 watts depending on the company and the possibility of installing 120 SoC in a 2U server, the ratio of number of cores / consumption is interesting.

In practice, there are two pitfalls: the Cortex A9, which is commonly used, is a 32-bit is limited to 4 GB of memory and power is limited. If for some uses it is not a problem, parallelization to compensate the lack of power of each core for other processors faster (and consume more) are needed.

Cortex A15, next to, ARM core, should fix some problems: it should be faster than the Cortex A9, climb higher in frequency and supports up to 1TB of RAM via a mode close EAP Veterans Intel processors, the CPU itself remaining a 32-bit model. For companies like Google and Microsoft, which store much data, but do not carry very heavy treatments, servers based ARM chips or Atom feeds are very interesting, as the gain in consumption is important.

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