LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers

Posted Mar 15, 2013 1:43 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers by butlerm
Parent article: LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers

you can't just connect processors to the memory bus, you need to setup some form of arbitration between them.

you can create systems with lots of cores, but it's not easy, it's not cheap, and it's not low power.

There's a lot more to making a non SMP system than just throwing cores on a memory bus.

LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers

Posted Mar 15, 2013 5:45 UTC (Fri) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

It's certainly wouldn't be trivial, but as long as the power required per core doesn't go up, you would come out far ahead of any kind of cache coherent design. Large scale applications can't rely on cache coherency, and so they don't. At some point it is just a waste of silicon.