I don't know how many of you people actually get into this stuff (LOL) anyhow TI has several new processor offerings (in the ARM realm) and 'rumor' has it they will be support the lig bittle err big little CPU soon as well.
The least of them (no DSP) starts here. 1 single core and 1 quad core A15.
The middle ground (1 DSP 2 and 4 core versions).
The biggerer parts which have DSP 2 and 4 core and RAPID IO (hmmm) so they can be cross connected to each other as well as high speed IO.
These are obviously slated at small to medium server applications as the lesser units have 10/100/1000/10000 ethernet MACS built in and the bigger units have rapid IO for larger scale deployements.
If you folks didn't know the 'big guys' IE google facebook etc DO NOT USE off the shelf servers (period) they build there own. They are highly customized and extremely high density.
In addition to that one must consider power in modern servers. That's where these ARM units and the big little cores litterally kick butt. The arm cores have a very high mips/watt ratio and to improve that in server applications ARM came out with big little. Simply put big little uses the 'big' processor core that is performance oriented for doing that stuff. When the server is doing light stuff the little core is used. This is done dynamically. In addition to that the servers automatically scale voltage and frequency based on loading of the system. This means major power savings compared to other schemes.
Cyb
PS in case people didn't bother reading the specs they include an ethernet hub can have up to 8gigs of external ECC memory and have an address space of 512G (not megs) along with 2 PCIe slots ... in one chip. None of them have internal graphics system but they have plenty of IO, and the hub is controlled by it's own processor (along with encryption engines etc.)
PPS: And in another geek moment I found sockets for these things (http://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/catalog/Content/Drawings/SG-BGA-7185Dwg.pdf) the cool thing is that will also act as a heat sink (of course the A-8 unfortunately they don't even have samples for the aforementioned fancy ICs. Looks like they have an option with 10G ethernet (2 connections) or one with the high speed serialized bus. They appear to be mostly for Video (IE video conferencing) but that seems a bit of a pathetic application for such nice hardware honestly.
The least of them (no DSP) starts here. 1 single core and 1 quad core A15.
The middle ground (1 DSP 2 and 4 core versions).
The biggerer parts which have DSP 2 and 4 core and RAPID IO (hmmm) so they can be cross connected to each other as well as high speed IO.
These are obviously slated at small to medium server applications as the lesser units have 10/100/1000/10000 ethernet MACS built in and the bigger units have rapid IO for larger scale deployements.
If you folks didn't know the 'big guys' IE google facebook etc DO NOT USE off the shelf servers (period) they build there own. They are highly customized and extremely high density.
In addition to that one must consider power in modern servers. That's where these ARM units and the big little cores litterally kick butt. The arm cores have a very high mips/watt ratio and to improve that in server applications ARM came out with big little. Simply put big little uses the 'big' processor core that is performance oriented for doing that stuff. When the server is doing light stuff the little core is used. This is done dynamically. In addition to that the servers automatically scale voltage and frequency based on loading of the system. This means major power savings compared to other schemes.
Cyb
PS in case people didn't bother reading the specs they include an ethernet hub can have up to 8gigs of external ECC memory and have an address space of 512G (not megs) along with 2 PCIe slots ... in one chip. None of them have internal graphics system but they have plenty of IO, and the hub is controlled by it's own processor (along with encryption engines etc.)
PPS: And in another geek moment I found sockets for these things (http://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/catalog/Content/Drawings/SG-BGA-7185Dwg.pdf) the cool thing is that will also act as a heat sink (of course the A-8 unfortunately they don't even have samples for the aforementioned fancy ICs. Looks like they have an option with 10G ethernet (2 connections) or one with the high speed serialized bus. They appear to be mostly for Video (IE video conferencing) but that seems a bit of a pathetic application for such nice hardware honestly.
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