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takyon writes:

ARM licensees will be able to operate on 16 times more information per vector per instruction than before, using ARM's new Scalable Vector Extensions:

Today ARM is announcing an update to their line of architecture license products. With the goal of moving ARM more into the server, the data center, and high-performance computing, the new license add-on tackles a fundamental data center and HPC issue: vector compute. ARM v8-A with Scalable Vector Extensions won't be part of any ARM microarchitecture license today, but for the semiconductor companies that build their own cores with the instruction set, this could see ARM move up into the HPC markets. Fujitsu is the first public licensee on board, with plans to include ARM v8-A cores with SVE in the Post-K RIKEN supercomputer in 2020.

Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) will be a flexible addition to the ISA, and support from 128-bit to 2048-bit. ARM has included the extensions in a way that if included in the hardware, the hardware is scalable: it doesn't matter if the code being run calls for 128-bit, 512-bit or 2048-bit, the scheduler will arrange the calculations to compensate for the hardware that is available. Thus a 2048-bit code run on a 128-bit SVE core will manage the instructions in such a way to complete the calculation, or a 128-bit code on a 2048-bit core will attempt to improve IPC by bundling 128-bit calculations together. ARM's purpose here is to move the vector calculation problem away from software and into hardware.

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