Ask the Experts: Krisztián Flautner VP of R&D, ARM
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2014 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Ask the Experts
- SoCs
Late last year we did an installment of Ask the Experts with ARM's Peter Greenhalgh, lead architect for the Cortex A53. The whole thing went so well, in no small part to your awesome questions, that ARM is giving us direct access to a few more key folks over the coming months.
Krisztián Flautner is Vice President of Research and Development at ARM, and as you can guess - he's focused on not the near term, but what's coming down the road for ARM. ARM recently celebrated its 50 billionth CPU shipment via its partners, well Krisztián is more focused on the technologies that will drive the next 100 billion shipments.
Krisztián holds PhD, MSE and BSE degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. He leads a global team that researches everything from circuits to processor/system architectures and even devices. And he's here to answer your questions.
If there's anything you want to ask the VP of R&D at ARM, this is your chance. Leave a comment with your question and Krisztián will go through and answer any he's able to answer. If you've got questions about process tech, Moore's Law, ARM's technology roadmap planning or pretty much anything about where ARM is going, ask away!
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KFlautner - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
Which cores get used for which market is ultimately up to our silicon partners.What ARM does is make sure is that we offer all the features that they need to take ARM cores into the appropriate segments.
OreoCookie - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Sure, but it seems to me that there is a burgeoning ARM server market, demand seems to be there. Since the requirements for server cores are different from those you have in mobile applications, I was wondering how ARM will address that market. (Apart from offering custom cores for that market, bringing suitable interconnects to market could be another approach.)KFlautner - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
ARM does offer server class interconnects. Take a look at this story on our CCN interconnect technologies http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/05/08/arm-serve...chrone - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
Hi Anand and Krisztian,When will we see a high performance single thread CPU and powerful GPU in ARM?
4/8 cores do not make sense in mobile platform since they only throttles a lot and makes the transition animation stutters or janky on Android due to the low performance when throttling.
Krysto - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
What do you mean? Cortex A57 not powerful enough for mobile? Or do you mean in PC's?ARM doesn't need to target PCs with a higher performance/higher power consumption CPU and GPU. They will get there in a few years. "There" being around the same level of performance with Intel's mainstream Core chips. Why? Because Intel will forego chasing performance because:
1) it's getting increasingly more expensive for them to do so
2) chasing lower power consumption is much easier at this point, and also a pretty marketable feature.
Plus ARM CPUs are increasing in performance with each generation much more than Intel's CPUs do. So in a few years we'll see parity. ARM should be more concerned with Performance/Watt, since that's really where they will have to worry about Intel, since Intel is a node and a half ahead of ARM chips right now (although this gap will shrink with the arrival of FinFET, but still).
samirotiv - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
Hello,Could you please tell me a little about the kind of branch predictors that are used in ARM CPUs?
Is there scope to use the more modern predictors, such as TAGE, or are more primitive predictors, such as Gshare, used because of their simplicity?
Krysto - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Where's Cortex A55, and why didn't we see it launch at the same time with A53 and A57?findx - Saturday, June 7, 2014 - link
It was mentioned earlier that:"An area I find interesting from an architecture point-of-view is machine learning. But we'll need some time for the algorithms to settle before we'd design in too much deep support for new workloads."
Beyond SIMD for matrix routines, what types of new architecture level support do you envision helping machine learning workloads?
Wardrive86 - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link
Does the increase in single precision NEON performance in the Cortex a57 (vs a15) come from just a clock speed increase? Can you talk about any enhancements that has been made to the FPU and NEON?martinez.lopez.alvaro - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
Is there any interest by ARM of targeting the HPC market? Or more specifically, does ARM want to be in the top500 list with ARM cores alone (i.e without third parties accelerator, something like Intel Xeon Phi)?