[HH] cores: AMD vs Intel

[Shankar Viswanathan]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Kurt Keville <kkeville at mit.edu> wrote:
> one thing I wasn't sure of in Anand's article... he said the ARM
> Cortex-A15 was capable of addressing 16 GB but the A9 was only capable of
> addressing 4GB... they are both ARMv7 so I don't think that is correct...

The Cortex A15 is based on the ARMv7A architecture and introduced the
Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE):
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a15.php
http://www.arm.com/files/pdf/at-exploring_the_design_of_the_cortex-a15.pdf

Each process is still limited to a 32-bit virtual address space, but
you can have a lot more physical address space to limit page swapping
to disk in virtualized environments.

Regarding Federico's original question, I agree that the choice
completely comes down to the workload (my personal bias
notwithstanding).

-Shankar