Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
New ARM processor: 2.5 GHz, quad-core, with virtualization hardware (pcmag.com)
4 points by pjscott on Sept 9, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


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.


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


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.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: