Full-stack dev here with almost no real hardware knowledge.
Why would you want to use ARM instead of X86 on a server like this? The architecture switch comes with dependency headaches -- what counterbalances those to make it worth it?
Why would you want to use ARM instead of X86 on a server like this? The architecture switch comes with dependency headaches -- what counterbalances those to make it worth it?
These particular servers are based on the Cavium ThunderX which has (up to) 48 cores per socket, and usually two sockets per server. Each individual core is rather slow. The servers themselves are not noticably cheaper in price than x86-based servers. As noted above it's very early days.
There are some more interesting servers coming along. In particular Qualcomm have a 48 core ARM server SoC which has great performance per core, and should ship in a few months. (They are already shipping final silicon to partners and a few developers)
What could make the difference would be:
- ARM partners currently ship around 40x cores annually relative to Intel. Of course the vast majority being phone/tablet 32 bit cores, but that kind of volume might mean that future ARM servers become very cheap, or have an incredibly high density of cores.
- Multiple vendors are allowed to design ARM SoCs, so we may find that particular vendors optimize for more niche use cases, and if your use case happens to be that niche, that could be a win for you.
As an example of the last point: Could your application use 16 x ethernet ports and some custom hardware to process SDN dataplane (eg OpenFlow) tables, all on a single System-on-Chip? Good luck getting Intel to design such a chip for you. However an ARM partner would be entirely free to develop such a chip, and maybe hardware like that will form an important part of telecoms/OpenStack cloud deployments in future.
You mean given the rather slow cores? I can't think of any provider offering x86 bare metal at this price.
Currently, ARM can't touch the performance of a mid to highend x86.
But ARM is extremely cheap and a solid low to mid x86.
If top end performance isn't needed. And you have the ability to recompile your software to run on ARM, you can't beat ARM pricing.
Just look at the OP link.
$12/mo for 8 cores.
For x86, you'd easily pay 10x that per month.
Scaleway offers baremetal x86 servers with 8 cores for 17.99€/month (C2M). [0] But they are based on Intel Atom, so the performance is quite low.
For €12/month you get 8 (slower) cores and 8 GB of RAM. At a place like Hetzner roughly the same price gets you 2 (faster) cores and 4 GB of RAM. For some workload more slower cores and more RAM gives better performance that fewer faster cores and less RAM.
The main difference is that you get a 8-cores machine with 200GB ssd and 8 gb ram for the price of a 1 core, 1GB ram, 30GB ssd on digitalocean and similar. Scaleway is still developing some extra features [* * ], for most hobbyist to medium scale usage, i think it's going to be just fine (plus, the monetary savings).
It is to be said that each of those 8 cores are likely to be individually slower than an usual x86 core, but you get 8 instead of 1 and they're fully yours: you don't have to share cpu time with other users, as it happens on pretty much all vps providers: you're renting a whole machine.
[* ] = applications written in C/C++ will work flawlessly, as long as they don't exploit x86-specific features. If you're doing web stuff, you're unlikely to hit this spot.
[* * ] = see C14, an S3-like storage service.
That's not true with these. These are VPSs backed by a 48-core physical server. Scalaway does have an older baremetal ARMv7 server offering though.