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Comment by yazr | Hacker News Reader

a. single threaded code

b. extended benchmark duration - no thermal throttling encountered

c. straight forward C compiler - no special code for the GPU unit or whatever

d. main reason is probably memory and cache configuration

I think it is time to consider A(RM) and Intel cores at par. Qualcomm cores maybe X% slower but they will close the gap.

It is now a question of system trade-offs, as designers jangle memory sizes, cache sizes, cores, cooling, vector extensions, etc

This is a really pivotal event.

And dont forget AMD challenging Intel on like-for-like cores.

Its pretty amazing that noone has put together a real ARM alternative for the server side.

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> I think it is time to consider A(RM) and Intel cores at par. Qualcomm cores maybe X% slower but they will close the gap.

I think you're vastly underestimating the value of X in the above. The latest Qualcomm cores weren't even competitive with last year's A11, and the A12 leaves them in the dust.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...

> noone has put together a real ARM alternative for the server side

Cavium (now under Marvell) and Ampere both did. Huawei/HiSilicon are also apparently coming.

(Also Qualcomm, but they quit for mysterious reasons. "Want to focus on mobile" or something.)

But these are all very high end solutions. For the low end, there's Marvell's Armada8k (MACCHIATObin)… and kind of an empty void in the middle :(

Cavium’s is a 96 core x 4 node in a 2U config. Sure it’s high end, but it’s what you need to compete with similar compute dense rack servers from eg Dell.

The original ThunderX was up to 96 cores in 2 sockets, but single core perfomance was unimpressive (comparable to Cortex-A72).

ThunderX2 is 64 cores in 2 sockets, with 4-way SMT, up to 3GHz turbo, and the cores are way better.

// It's great that they're competing with dense rack servers, I just wish the low end to mid range market wasn't ignored :(

Yep I guess it’s a ramp up issue. Easier to have bare metal hard ware at high end and then slice it up into cheap servers.

The consequences of that are big. This will lead to commoditization of IP cores, cpus, and this will lead to a race to the bottom with the likes of Allwinner, Amlogic, Rockchip, NXP offering products competitive with Intel, Amd, Apple, Samsung. As the margins will go to near-0, companies like Intel will suffer the most.

This is assuming that semiconductor process improvements will significantly slow down or completely stop.

Agreed this can lead to interesting times again in the cpu space. I guess this can lead to two scenarios : either there are possible improvements that are possible but were not necessary for intel to unleash to be dominant, thus leading to significant improvements (in whichever direction, parallelism, power, cache, price) and compute will be better for the same price thanks to competition or investments won't be worth the perf gains and while prices will go down, performance will stagnate since there won't be much incentive to pay ten times the price for 10% improvements (random BS numbers).

Where would risc-v fit into this? I'd assume it'd help accelerate the commoditization, maybe not in the server space at first but definitely for IoT and embedded applications.

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