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ARM’s built its business around power-efficient chips that are perfect for mobile applications (like tablets and smartphones), but that pedigree could transfer over to another technical arena as well, one that has traditionally been dominated by Intel and AMD: high-powered computing. In fact, Sumit Gupta, who serves as the senior manager of Nvidia’s Tesla GPU Computing HPC business, says that ARM chips are “inherently much more energy efficient than an x86 CPU” – and that fact makes Nvidia feel that the future of supercomputing lies in ARM.
Gupta points out some interesting things to consider. Intel and the x86 architecture arose from computers plugged into sockets, so power wasn’t a major consideration until recently – improving performance in Windows (and other OSes) was. “It’s a terrific processor for everyday computing,” Gupta says. “Not the right device as we go to high performance computing,” which involves less random inputs and much more power consumption. ARM’s power-efficient CPUs, apparently, are the right devices, at least in Nvidia’s eyes – especially when they’re supplemented by Nvidia CUDA GPUs (like the Barcelona Supercomputing Center), of course.
Thanks to +Patrick Moorhead for pointing this out!
Comments are closed on this article
warptek2010
December 10, 2011 at 11:22pm
Everybody knows that the future of supercomputing is Duotronics then Multitronics then Isolinear. Pheww, come on!
illusionslayer
December 10, 2011 at 2:33pm
"Not the right device as we go to high performance computing."
Last time I checked pretty much every high performance device uses x86. You show me an ARM that will compete with an 8-core SB-E (Once Intel enables the extra 2 cores.) and I'll begin to believe that ARM is a good idea for high-performance.
georgec
December 09, 2011 at 11:53am
...graphene and/or quantum computing. x86 and ARM will both be irrelevant in 15-20 years.
AnglicDemon00
December 09, 2011 at 11:42am
My question is for how long will Arm stay ahead. If I am not mistaken the next set of intel chips are much more power efficent then pervious generations, and I believe intel will continue with that trend for power computing that needs less power hungry CPU's. With that being sad we also have look at the power of CPU's not just how much energy the can save. From what I know and heard, the main reason intel holds such a large market share in power computing if the fact of how much power their CPU's can put out.
chronium
December 09, 2011 at 1:36pm
Well Nvidia are workin on a desktop ARM CPU so that would also help explain why they like to promote it.
win7fanboi
December 09, 2011 at 11:31am
video is lot less sensational that the headline.
ARM chips are “inherently much more energy efficient than an x86 CPU” - No duh!
“It’s a terrific processor for everyday computing,” - Sure
“Not the right device as we go to high performance computing,” - I guess time will tell.
It is interesting though that in this months MPC magazine, Gordon was hoping that American's realize the power of discrete graphics and GPUs has the spotlight in Nvidia's experiment.
Supall
December 09, 2011 at 11:23am
No, the future of supercomputing is a complete redesign of the computer, in my opinion.
