Chips and cheese on ARM’s A510

dada_dave

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Interesting deep dive on ARM’s little cores. On the comparison to AMD’s Bulldozer:

Bulldozer is an obvious comparison because it also shares substantial resources between core pairs. However, shared resources had little to do with Bulldozer’s performance problems. In fact, Bulldozer was most competitive in multithreaded applications where there could be contention for shared resources. Bulldozer issues came from having less per-thread reordering capacity and higher cache latency than Sandy Bridge in a market where single-thread performance was of paramount importance. Cortex A510 does not target the high performance market. If performance did matter A510 would be held back by its in-order execution scheme, not shared resources. Instead of performance, A510 targets low power and area. Sharing resources fits that goal perfectly.
 

Cmaier

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Interesting deep dive on ARM’s little cores. On the comparison to AMD’s Bulldozer:

My bulldozer predictions gave me more internet fame than I ever wanted, and you bringing bulldozer up here just gave me flashbacks.
 

Cmaier

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Oh? I wasn’t really around tech forums at that point, what happened?

I predicted that Bulldozer was going to suck, and explained my theory why, based on what I knew about how it was being designed (I was around for the beginning of that) and some changes in management and staff.

The initial reaction was I must be bitter because I had to have been fired or something, and that Bulldozer was going to be great.

A year or two later when it was apparent bulldozer was a disaster, people dredged up my old comments and started posting about it all over the web:


etc. etc.

My inbox blew up, with some friends who were still at AMD not very happy with me, and I was told I was a topic of conversation over there.
 

dada_dave

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I predicted that Bulldozer was going to suck, and explained my theory why, based on what I knew about how it was being designed (I was around for the beginning of that) and some changes in management and staff.

The initial reaction was I must be bitter because I had to have been fired or something, and that Bulldozer was going to be great.

A year or two later when it was apparent bulldozer was a disaster, people dredged up my old comments and started posting about it all over the web:


etc. etc.

My inbox blew up, with some friends who were still at AMD not very happy with me, and I was told I was a topic of conversation over there.
Ah, yeah I can see how that would not be fun
 
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