New ARM processor: 2.5 GHz, quad-core, with virtualization hardware

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368924,00.asp

by pjscott • 16 years ago

4 3 16 years ago

pjscott• 16 years ago

Of course their main market is smart phones and tablets, but this looks especially compelling for servers. Someone like Amazon could buy a bunch of these, attach a bunch of memory to each one, and use a hypervisor to offer something like their newly-announced micro instances. The hardware cost could be lowered, and the low-power nature of the chips would really be useful in large datacenters. Or look at Google: if they can fit the servers for responding to search queries into the 4 GB address space that the Cortex-A15 offers to a single guest OS, this could seriously lower the cost of doing searches -- something that's even more important now that they're doing instant searches as you type.

Of course, it'll be a few years before you can actually buy these. In the meantime, a lot of what I mentioned above can be done with the Cortex-A9, which is just now coming into mass production.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

Any IO bound process (that remains IO bound on a slower CPU) is a strong candidate for servers based on the A15. Couple it with simple network coprocessors and you are set.

I would still love to have an ARM-based netbook.

wmf• 16 years ago

Why Google doesn't want to use ARM servers (yet): http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf

New ARM processor: 2.5 GHz, quad-core, with virtualization hardware

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