ARM Community: What a Difference 7 Days Makes! ARMv8 and HP's Moonshot Program - ARM Community

Wow! What a week! I sat in my house last Friday resting my plates and reflecting on ARM TechCon. A few journalists I spoke with were caught off guard by Mike Muller’s announcement of the ARMv8 instruction set during Thursday’s keynote, quickly followed by Applied Micro’s (APM) announcement of their X-Gene product that will be based on this same ARMv8 instruction set. “We thought you would be announcing 64-bit 9-12 months from now” was a common refrain. Like all companies, there are the products and strategies that are above the waterline….and then a number that lie below…Some deeper than others. So when I replied to a question on my blog last week, I was limited in my reply. But now, with the ARMv8 64-bit instruction set appearing above the waterline, we are now on the path to address one of the concerns outlined…Admittedly at early stages, but on the way. And as for an ARM powered platform entering the top 500 Supercomputer list? That is even further away. With that said, our work with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center should indicate that we are investigating this area too.

As Mike noted in his keynote, our industry now has to consider a broad set of platforms as “energy constrained systems.” This extends from battery-based applications (of course) through to high performance computing. You will hear a little more about ARM’s view of the latter of these at this year’s Supercomputing show in Seattle next month. Andrew Sloss’s blog includes more details.

As I talked about in my first blog earlier this month, ARM fervently believes that the combination of the increasing cost of power, coupled with the diversity of server workloads is going to drive segmentation in the server market. The future lies in the adoption of heterogeneous compute nodes that feature an integrated set of peripherals and accelerators optimized for a specific (or a class of) server workload(s). Will APM’s device efficiently solve every problem in the server industry when the device starts to sample at the end of next year? Absolutely not. Does the harnessing of a 32-bit processor subsystem, such as Calxeda’s EnergyCore device announced today work optimally for all platforms? No.

But back to the events of this week. I have mentioned before that Java is a critical piece in this puzzle. I met up with David Clack from Oracle at ARM TechCon with a systems partner he has been working with was showing a prototype server platform. You can see a picture of the system and get a little more information here.

The key from here is to turn these high level statements into more specific examples outlining which approaches are better for specific workloads. So we are incredibly excited to support HP’s Moonshot program that was announced on November 1^st. I have mentioned before that the software ecosystem needs to mature from where it is today. The first step is of course moving code originally written for x86 and getting this code migrated over to ARM. However, in order for companies to truly change the efficiency of systems constructed from nodes featuring lower performance compute, new types of applications will need to be written. And this is where I see the Pathfinder program as playing a key part in fueling this development. Supported by ARM, Calxeda, Canonical and RedHat, in addition to HP, companies will be able to test and optimize existing and new software applications for hardware. We welcome HP’s thought leadership in this area, coupled with a set of practical steps that will enable this industry to create and innovate in the server domain again. No one at ARM thinks this is going to be easy. It will be quite a long time before you see ARM powered platforms entering this market in any significant volume. But then if it was easy, anybody could do it!

More soon…

Ian Ferguson, Director of Server Systems and Ecosystem, ARM, has spent years fighting from the corner of the underdog. Most of those scars are healing nicely. Ian is particularly passionate about taking ARM technology into new types of applications that do not exist or are at the very formative stages. Consequently, he is driving ARM’s server program with a view to reinvent the way the server function is implemented in networks as opposed to simply replacing incumbent platforms.