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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3

Look at Cavium ThunderX: 48 ARMv8 cores, very high performance, 95W.

The key question is which workloads will actually benefit from many low single-thread performance cores. While there are some where such a node coupled with a GPU compute cluster will probably be the useful but it seems like a vast majority of server deployments just want good single-thread perf with 2 or more hardware threads.

Don't necessarily assume that all ARM cores will have low single-thread performance. Especially with 64 bit server-class ARM SoCs, the performance can be rather good.

there arn't a lot of workloads a laptop is going to care about that utilize 4 cores, let alone 48. Each indivual core is going to be 1/10th the preformance or less of an intel one.

It would feel dreadfully slow by comparison.

You won't be running a Cavium part in your laptop, ever. They specialize in parts for enterprise servers and telecoms.

However, my phone has 6 x 64 bit ARMv8 cores.

I think you're talking about the Snapdragon 808 which your phone has. That's a big.LITTLE CPU which means that it's meant to use the 4 little cores almost all of the time and use the big cores only when high performance is really required. What I mean to say is that the 4+2/4+4/4+4+4 configurations aren't meant to parallelize across all cores but rather to minimize power consumption.

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