ARM has consistently gone on record to tout its offerings for HPC to match rival Intel’s claims. However, they have been rather mum when it comes to involvement with cloud computing in this context.
According Ian Drew, the company has plans to continue tackling the high performance computing market. He told an audience of potential partners this week in Taipei that the company’s 2020 vision is to move into new arenas, including high performance cloud computing.
It is significant that he gave the talk in Taiwan as almost half of ARM’s business comes from the APAC region with 40 percent in North America and 14 percent in Europe.
During Drew’s speech he touched on some of the larger issues the company will be addressing under the 2020 vision, including the broad matters of functionality and energy. He told the audience that “low power hardware is really the future driver.”
Back in September of 2010 with the launch of Eagle the first hints that this was on the horizon emerged amidst discussions about their 2.5 GHz Cortex A15 “Eagle” processor. This was not meant for the smartphone market, but rather, as EE Times reported, “at the network infrastructure, server and cloud computing space. The A15 architecture is designed for big machine problems…the total address space is 1 terabyte, far in excess of the needs of mobile or embedded computing.”