On 11/27/2012 07:46 AM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > i dug around in price of ARMs and development boards. > > If you just buy a handful most interesting offer seems to be > > http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php? > g_code=G133999328931 > > it's $129 and has a quad core ARM cortex A9 at 1.4Ghz and a mali gpu > on it. > > So from raw cpu cores this is by far best offer on the market, > nothing even gets close to it,
Maybe if you want the maximum cores per $ regardless of performance. Atom boards are likely to give you: * substantially better CPU performance * 10x the network bandwidth * 4x the memory size Like say the $70 board with a D2500 (1.86GHz dual core) or the $80 D2700 (2.1 GHz dual core/4 thread). > The number of quadcore offers is pretty limited in ARM world - it's > nearly all dual cores there. Umm, you seem to be ignoring quite a few quad core arm chips. Like say the nexu s4, nexus 7, nexus 10, and many others. Both the tegra quad core and the Snapdragon quad core seem rather common. > This CPU should be eating at 1.0Ghz exactly 3 watt under full load > and a tad more at 1.4Ghz, > though the "1.4Ghz" clock i couldn't confirm in an easy manner. Could > be the quadcore version is 1.0 > Ghz after all. Sounds like hand waving to me, have you actually measured this? Were all cores and network in use? Was it diskless? ssd? sata? > The cortex A15 that goes in production in 2013 maybe, that one is 64 Er, the cortex-a15 is 32 bit, it has a PAE like extension to allow bank swapping. You probably mean the cortex a57 which is 64 bit (and not shipping) The cortex a15 however shipping in tablets (the nexus 10), laptops (the chrome book), and motherboards (the Arndale). The A15 benchmarks look pretty good compared to the A9, TI has an OMAP 5, Samsung has the Exynos 5250. My interest in Arm has been the flip side of balancing flops to network bandwidth. A standard dual socket (AMD or Intel) can trivially saturate GigE. One option for improving the flops/network balance is to add network bandwidth with Infiniband. Another is a slower, cheaper, cooler CPU and GigE. > A big hurdle always is the many dual core ARMS out there which do not > have fast RAM yet which only have I believe the cortex a15 substantially improves memory bandwidth. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
