Benchmarks Of The 24-Core ARM Socionext 96Boards Developerbox

[AndyChow]

This thing would be great as an automated test box. If you are developing on ARM, you might want to have 23 VMs running a continuous script to test all functions on whatever gets uploaded to your repo, each VM being a different Android version. And sure, if you are playing in ARM ecosystem all the time, this is nice.

But it's not really impressive on any metric. There are many low power cores, but not that many to be impressive. 24 is meh these days.

A53 cores are supposed to be so small, give me 255 of them for 140W instead if 24 cores at 33W. Then I might find use for it. Not when you can get real huge 32+ core full instruction CPUs that can emulate the ARM stuff much faster in real time metrics, not theoretical clock metrics.

[ProDigit]

Would have been great if the performance was there.
most of the board's power (75-85%) does not come from the CPU. The 5W tdp chip running only 2W higher at load, would have made a lot more sense if it would run at 2,5Ghz at 20W instead. Power/performance ratios are off.
I mean, a 24 core 1 Ghz arm processor like this, performs similar to a 12 core 2Ghz, or an 8 core 3Ghz arm CPU.
I bet the latter two CPUs would only consume 2 to 4watts more.
This design would make sense, if it can be scaled up by 10x. A 128-256 core arm CPU at 1Ghz does make sense.

Don't forget Intel Larrabee, that got scrapped for exactly the same reason, too low core by core CPU performance, and overall system power consumption was too high.

It would be a massive hit if it had 3 to 4 hyperthreads per core!