> Designing a manycore CPU, which the Post-K processor will almost certainly be, with a simpler RISC core as its base, is inherently more efficient than trying to do that with a more complex architecture like SPARC64.<p>Honestly, ARM is a very complex architecture these days. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand instructions. It's very close to x86 in complexity. Tons of cruft built up over the past thirty years too (although it was a cleaner architecture than x86 to start off with so it has that going for it).
In the general space of computing, what kinds of alternatives to the Xeon Phi are there that want to do their own mini-supercomputer tasks? (very subjective on task definition, but for now let's suppose things that are hard to do on a GPU effectively).<p>It seems like the Parallella tried to get close, but did not succeed in breaking into the market. (On Amazon, looks to be marketed more for a high powered raspberry pi alternative...)<p>Which seems to be more useful? The power to compile same code with alternate flags (Xeon Phi style); cross-compile to other arch's (x86 host -> ARM binary); JIT bytecode, LLVM bitcode, or Intermediate-Representation formats?<p>What kind of access patterns would be most common for a hobbyist or an enterprise to cater to? For example, one issue the Xeon Phi has is memory controller contention, which makes it less optimal for less structured relational analysis.
I don't get why people keep reporting this as ARM unseating x86 when in this specific case its ARM replacing SPARC. Is there a perspective I am missing?