Gezzer

October 28, 2011 at 4:03am

First off I'm not really all that knowledgeable about the internal workings of a server. I know that there are different types of servers for different needs. But from what I've been lead to believe one of the problems with the current versions of server CPUs is that they don't excel when called to do a very large number of small calculations and are very power inefficent due to they're megalitic CISC structures.

Secondly while most current consumer level computers are 64bit with 64bit OSs, in truth it's still not that important for the majority of what people use computers for and we would still get resonable performance in a 32bit enviroment. On the other hand servers needed and went 64bit a longtime ago because of the way the server CISC CPUs are structured. They needed large memory and storage pools to keep the CPUs feed with data so 64bit was the locigal next step.

So if ARM SoC are the much more efficent RISC processor but would reguire a much larger number of processors to egual the processing power of a CISC CPU where does the need for a 64bit ARM SoC come in? I'm not sure it's really needed. Maybe a 64bit IO controller chip, but each ARM SoC? Would a four core ARM SoC be able to crunch data fast enough that it needs the same 64bit data pools that 64bit CISC CPU does? Wouldn't going 64bit be moving away from the high efficent SoC that has been ARMs major strength?

I don't know and I could be wrong, but this sounds like a bullet point feature more then anything to me.