To clarify, can this RISC base processor (the Tegra K1) be used without significant changes to today's supercomputer programs, and perhaps be a game changer because if it's power, size, cost, and energy usage? I know it's going up against some x64 or x86 processors. Can the code used for current supercomputers be easily converted to code that will run well on these Mobile chips? Thanks.
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The ARM host might be RISC, but I'm not sure if you can call the NVIDIA K1 either RISC or CISC. – Jeff Hammond Jan 04 '15 at 05:12
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Can the code used for current supercomputers be easily converted to code that will run well on these Mobile chips?
It depends what you call "supercomputers code". Usually supercomputers run high-level functional code (usually fully compiled code like C++, sometimes VMs-dependent code like Java) on top of other low-lewel code and technologies such as OpenCL or CUDA for accelerators or MPICH for communication between nodes.
All these technologies have ARM implementations so the real thing is to make the functional code is ARM-compatible. This is usually straightforward as code written in high level language is mostly hardware-independent. So the short answer is: yes.
However, what may be more complicated is to scale this code to these new processors. Tegra K1 is nothing like the GPUs embedded in supercomputers. It has far less memory, runs slightly slower and has only 192 cores. Its price and power consumption make it possible, however, to build supercomputers with hundreds of them inside. So code which have been written for traditionnal supercomputers (a few high-performance GPUs enbedded) will not reach the peak performance of 'new' supercomputers (built with a lot of cheap and weak GPUs). There will be a price to pay to existing code on these new architectures.
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For modern supercomputing needs, you'd need to answer if a processor can perform well for the energy it consumes. Current architecture of Intel along with GPUs fulfill those needs and Tegra architecture do not perform as well in terms of power-performance to Intel processors.
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The question is should it? Intel keeps proving that ARM is inferior and the only factor speaking for using RISC base processors is their price, which I highly doubt is a concern when building super computer.
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Your response is fraught with invalid assumptions. You don't appear to have a good grasp of the RISC vs. CISC debate. And price is absolutely a concern when building a supercomputer. The only part you got right is that Intel makes superior processors to ARM. – Jeff Hammond Jan 05 '15 at 06:03