How does a supercomputer use a cell phone chip? The future is not a dream

[Guidance] researchers found that when running software on a single core, ARM chips are more efficient than Intel core chips and are more suitable for applications in high-performance computing systems.

On August 1, Beijing time, according to foreign media reports, researchers from the Barcelona super computing center published a paper saying that smartphone chips will one day replace x86 chips with higher prices and higher energy consumption, used in a supercomputer.

In the history of high-performance computing, cheaper chips have replaced faster and more expensive chips, the researchers said. In 1993, the vector chip-based supercomputer dominated the top 500 super computer rankings. Later, the vector chip was replaced by a lower-priced chip, such as IBM's power. Later, the chip was replaced by Intel Xeon and AMD opteron chips with lower prices. Currently, these chips are applied to over 500 super computer systems in the top 400 super computer rankings.

The researchers said that the replacement of supercomputer chips has something in common: microchips replace vector chips because they "have a much lower price and energy consumption. The speed of mobile chips is not faster, but the price is much lower ".

Currently, most smartphones and tablets are equipped with ARM chips. Intel has only achieved limited success in its X86 architecture.

As enterprises want to reduce the energy consumption of data centers, their interest in using mobile chips in servers is growing. Smart phone chips are considered suitable for processing loads consisting of large volumes of micro-transactions, such as displaying search results. Xeon, haolong and other chips with higher performance are considered to be the most suitable for running software with higher performance requirements, such as large databases and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.

One of the goals of the Barcelona supercomputing center is to develop a prototype server product that helps improve the performance ratio. We have developed a server that configures NVIDIA quad-core tegra3 chip and Samsung dual-core exynos5 chip.

Researchers have found that when running software on a single core, ARM chips are more efficient than Intel core chips and are more suitable for applications in high-performance computing systems. When using multi-core running software, ARM chips with the same clock frequency have the same efficiency as x86 chips. When the performance is the highest, the x86 chip runs more efficiently. When running software on a single core, the performance of exynos5250 is over 1.7 times that of tegra3.

Hewlett-Packard recently launched a moonshot server with an atom chip. In the future, HP is expected to launch a moonshot server with an ARM chip configured with calxeda and Texas Instruments. Dell launched an arm server prototype product and considered using low-energy chips in the supercomputer.

Researchers at the Barcelona supercomputing center pointed out the weakness of ARM chips, which may affect their application on servers. Currently, ARM chips use 32-bit computing technology, which means their addressing range is limited. The ARM chip also lacks Error Correction Technology and uses non-standard I/O (input/output) interfaces.

However, arm has released a 64-bit chip design. companies like calxeda, AMD, and appliedmicro will launch 64-bit ARM chips.

The researchers pointed out that with the development of the arm server market, technical problems will be solved, and fierce competition will further reduce product prices, "Mobile chips can be applied to high-performance computers ".