The move has already gained some momentum with ARM’s lead silicon partner for SVE, Fujitsu, planning to switch away from the SPARC reduced instruction set processors it now uses in its Riken K supercomputers, to ARM chips, for its Post-K 2020 flagship project.
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The announcement comes a few weeks after Japanese company Softbank said it would buy ARM for a mammoth $32 billion.
In summary, SVE opens a new chapter for the ARM architecture in terms of the scale and opportunity for increasing levels of vector processing on ARM processor cores.
At the Hot Chips conference, today, Toshio Yoshida of Fujitsu described how SVE will be used in the Post-K supercomputer.
Fujitsu chose ARM in July for the Post-K supercomputer after deciding to shift from the 2GHz Sun Sparc64 cores used in the K supercomputer.
The Post-K supercomputer will be the successor to Fujitsu’s K Computer, which is ranked as the fifth fastest computer in the world at present. Intel, IBM and Nvidia have also been pushing the limits of chip performance to reach that goal.
ARM’s new design is based on the company’s 64-bit ARM-v8A architecture, and one of its interesting features is it relies on vector processor extensions to deliver a performance boost, much like the earliest supercomputer chips in the late 1980s and early 1990s did.
ARM’s new chip design will help the company on two fronts.
ARM’s chip design will also be part of an influx of alternative chip architectures outside x86 and IBM’s Power entering supercomputing.
The Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, has 10,649,600 cores, three times that of its predecessor. It offers peak performance of 125.4 petaflops. However, with large server clusters quickly becoming the norm for emerging technologies like machine learning, these could clearly benefit from the low-precision calculations that a large congregation of ARM’s chips could provide.
Fujitsu, as a lead provider has been collaborating closely with ARM and contributed to the development of the HPC extensions (called SVE) for ARMv8-A, a cutting edge ISA optimized for a wide range of HPC.
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ARM server chip makers are also struggling and hanging on with the hope the market will take off someday. Qualcomm is testing its ARM server chip with cloud developers, and won’t release a chip until the market is viable.
