High-performance computing

We hardly have to feel bad for ARM, it’s not like it already owns 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 not by just a revitalised AMD but ARM as well. Server farms for decades have grappled with the issue that cooling costs more than running the darn servers, two-to-one back in the day, and 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 runs half the web. With so much bare metal to pay for, anything that saves on energy will benefit Amazon. So it designed its own server processor core called Graviton, and in 2020 released Graviton 2. It’s a 64-core SoC with 42MB of cache, running at 2.5GHz with eightchannel DDR4-3200 memory and 64 PCIe v4 lanes on the 7nm TSMC process. Estimates put power use at 100W vs 210W for a similarly pegged Xeon processor.

If that wasn’t enough, the all-new Japanese Fugaku system has taken the top spot for supercomputing power, besting the PowerPC/ Tesla-powered Summit system by 2.8x with a whopping 415.5 petaflops – but can it play Crysis using Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX Arm-based SoC? The UK’s national meteorological office is also planning to go ARM with another supercomputer that should claim the number-three spot once up and running in August 2022, offering 145 petaflops – enough to predict the weather before it happens!