Xeon and Opteron Will Die Out In Supercomputers Says Researchers

According to a report, detailed by Fudzilla, Spanish academics believe that the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors will one day in the “not-so-distant-future” die out and be replaced by supercomputers that use smartphone processors. Their report entitled “Are mobile processors ready for HPC?” suggests that smartphone microprocessors are both cheaper and greener than current x86 solutions from Intel and AMD.

The transition will be the fourth major transition in supercomputing that has seen it go from Vector processors to RISC processors to x86 Intel/AMD processors and then on to ARM processors in the future.

Their report compared Samsung’s 1.7GHz dual-core Exynos 5250, Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 and Intel’s 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7-2760QMand found that ARM processors were more power efficient in single core performance and that the ARM solutions scale more effectively in HPC environments. In a multi-core testing scenario both ARM and Intel processors were equally as efficient at a similar moderate clock speed but once the clock speed starts being raised higher Intel’s processors proved a lot more efficient.

So the important thing to note is that ARM architecture is now mature enough and cost effective enough to replace x86 in most server environments. Yet x86 still proves capable and efficient in most scenarios and given the large inertia in the server environment don’t expect new ARM supercomputers to appear anytime soon in force. They will probably gradually appear over the next decade before a major shift happens because ways of merging hundreds of ARM processors together in a server environment need to be effectively developed and standardised.

Image Credit VR-Zone