Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender
nextplatform.com
nextplatform.com
The X-Gene was complete crap in terms of both performance and power consumption. The ThunderX was only really useful for highly-parallel applications that don't require a lot of horsepower, and even then it's a power hog.
I'm cautiously optimistic with Qualcomm's Centriq and Cavium's ThunderX2, but unless they can make a compelling argument in terms of power consumption, I'm skeptical of them making any inroads into the market. Sure, Intel Xeons and IBM Power8s may suck power, but they're _damn_ fast, so you can execute your workloads quickly and then just shut the machine down or enter idle power states.
In the conclusion they mention: "The largest win by far for Falkor is the low power consumption." (Falkor is the name of Qualcomm's Core).
5+ years on, ARM on anywhere but mobile seems like a dud.
Who would imagine that the computer industry would go so far back in time as to leave off the RTC.
Oh but wait they added Bluetooth and Wifi. Yet no system time. Still waiting for a PCIe bus as well... Guess I need some more of that koolaide they are drinking.
RPI3 is not a 'server grade' ARM -
See e.g. the AMD 'Opteron A' boards:
http://www.lenovator.com/product/103.html#params
CPU Quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 64 bit
DRAM Two DDR3 SO-DIMM sockets
SATA Two SATA ports
USB Two USB 3.0 ports
Console USB-micro port for console support
Ethernet 1 GBe Ethernet
PCIe x16 PCIe G3 slot
Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch)
Tomorrow: ARM in your servers
Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop?
The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead?
I, for one, welcome our new ARM overlords.
The current MBP already has ARM: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-ma...
But this is similar to ARM (or MIPS or whatever) cores that already exist in all sort of peripherals (what's in your Wifi chipset? Bluetooth? SMC?), so it's nothing new.
I'm dismissive of any talk of switching conventional Intel-based desktop/laptops to ARM. It's not equivalent to Apple's switch from PPC to Intel, because in that case there was a clear performance advantage. ARM may have the performance-per-watt crown on the low-power end, but Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else. Conventional desktops still care about performance (and if you don't, likely you can switch to a Chromebook), and there aren't any advantages to switching a heavily Intel-ISA-dependent desktop ecosystem (macOS/Windows) to ARM.
The truth is that my phone doesn't have to be the fastest; it just has to be fast enough in balance with other factors important to me (size, battery life, etc).
And the same goes with my laptop. I currently have an MBP with an i7 processor, and I'm a web developer - it's overkill. I also play games with it now and then, but it's clear that the iGPU is the bottleneck there and not the processor. Very rarely do I do heavy compiling or video encoding or other CPU-maxing tasks on this thing.
So would I trade the i7 for an A-series plus a couple more hours of battery life and/or a lower (or at least not further increased, damn it Apple) price? Yes, I would take that trade, and probably never suffer for it.
0. https://www.gsmarena.com/lenovo_k80-7216.php
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i
2. https://www.tagheuer.com/en-us/watches/tag-heuer-connected-m...
I have a theory that probably when Apple will release a laptop with their own SoC it will be more expensive...
Perhaps an A-series laptop would be more expensive for consumers (damn it, Apple), but I don't think it would cost more for Apple to manufacture, since they can do so much more of it in house.
So an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? Apple already sells those!
But to play the devil's advocate, how is it not sufficiently laptop-ish for you? Because the keyboard is detachable? Because it has a touchscreen?
> But to play the devil's advocate, how is it not sufficiently laptop-ish for you? Because the keyboard is detachable? Because it has a touchscreen?
Lack of a mouse equivalent. Having to move your hands off the keyboard to do anything other than type is a pain in the ass.
The point of the article is that ThunderX is claimed to be faster than Xeon Gold for HPC applications.
But yes, arm cores are everywhere.
And it's not just coprocessors, next year we will see real ARM SoCs - https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo...
Next year^H^H^H^Hdecade: RISC-V in your ______
A bit similar to Linux/FOSS not having any decent CAD alternative to proprietary ones.
And laptops have had ARM coprocessors for quite a while. Power management controllers, disk controllers, NICs, etc.
Are the laptop co-processors you're talking about the 'R' lines? I know 'M' is for low-power mobile stuff and 'A' is for "Real Computer" stuff, but I was never too clear on the 'Realtime' lines.
But the distinction is something like:
M - Thumb2 only, simple two or three stage pipelines typically. Optional everything like selectable (at chip design time) multiply unit that's either 1 or 32 cycles of latency. MPU (if present) only adds protection information, but doesn't remap memory like a full MMU. An ascetic M has something like 12k gates which is insanely low for a 32 bit processor. It mainly competes with AVRs, 8051s, and maybe really low end MIPS if anyone is still using R3000s. In a laptop, I've seen them in power management controllers, bluetooth, and sometimes in WiFi.
R - More powerful than M. Runs Thumb and A32. Clear, deterministic. In order pipeline, tightly coupled memory, and an MPU so that you can still run hard real time cycle counting kind of code twiddling GPIOs carefully, but then also running DSP on the results afterward. I've seen a lot of these in hard disk controllers. They're sort of spiritual successors to the ARM9/7 you know from the DS. Competes with most MIPS.
A - Sort of all over the place. Some are 32bit, some are both 32 and 64. Has a real, page table MMU. Typically run real, big boy kernels like Linux. Competes with Atoms, higher end MIPS (see a trend?) and POWER at the very high end if you squint enough. Typically they're complex enough that you can't cycle count and get deterministic results (longer pipelines, TLB that'll refill 'randomly', cache refills, more complex branch predictor), but give higher overall performance. I think I've seen an A8 as a sound processor? Typically though they're not really a coprocessor, the gate count is too high to make sense.
And they're moving to a ~40nm process on those performance lines soon.
It's like when people were all excited they were testing LiquidMetal in their SIM ejection tool (not sure if that was apocryphal).
Ideally, Android and iOS will evolve so phones and tablets replace the desktop for more people.
What makes a laptop a laptop is a decent keyboard and a reasonably large screen. There is a fundamental mismatch between the screen size comfortable for the eyes, keyboard size comfortable for typing, and device size comfortable for holding in hand. Because of this, I don't think phones and laptops will ever converge; tablets and laptops are already actively converging, though.
Would be great for stuff like multigrid methods where you are balancing parallelism and latency:
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-...
And yes, I am willing to trade in performance, for more security. My MacBook should be every bit as power conserving as my iPhone, perhaps with a GPU for multi screen and playing videos.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo...
Which ARM SoC has mainlined drivers in Linux kernel? I fear that the ARM trend will only help to make the the e-waste mountain higher.
That said it's unclear what the volume on those parts will be once higher-grade CPUs come out, which will impact pricing/availability. And newer parts are going to be necessary for competitive performance/power. If the only place you can get a 14nm Thunder X2 is some high-end SuperMicro workstation, it'll be somewhat limiting in the end, anyway. (You can buy a Thunder X1 prebuilt desktop on the order of $1500 USD right now, at least.)
ARMv7 of course is a different bag of worms; Mali tends to ruin everything. But if you can avoid it, a lot of systems can get by with upstream U-Boot and upstream Linux... You can even get some cheap Asus chromebook laptops that can run libreboot and upstream everything (including WiFi if you buy a dongle.)
I’d go as far as saying Arm servers are compatible to x86 designs at a platform level (eg. how PCIe and config space are wired up, how caches and DMA work, NUMA, SMP, MSI(X), and so on....
I understand that some works may be hard to miniaturize.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
Either way, competition is definitely heating-up in the server space. If I were them I would price these chips super-aggressively (near-cost) for first few generations to get rapid mass adoption and software support. Worry about profits later, when they are established as serious players in the server chip market.
[1]https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/technology...
[1] Though they could be interesting for applications that are memory BW bound and don't vectorize that well.
This is ARM's model and they have shown no interest in improving things beyond kicking open source developers between the ARM and SOC vendors each blaming the other for years on end.
Intel, even with something as nasty as ME, look like an angel in comparison.
That has been true only for the embedded and mobile space.
The server space is exactly being made open and compatible between SoCs (in the same way AMD and Intel machines are). Platform crud (i2c, gpio, i2c, clock trees and pinnmuxes) is hidden in firmware behind ACPI, PSCI and UEFI just like on x86. SBSA and SBBR specs mandate stringent compatibility requirements. Machine error handling is firmware-first. IO is basically PCIe now.
For an OS vendor or an IT guy these machines look almost exactly like an x86 box. And then they look the same between the Arm vendors too.
ARM's model is to develop/license the ARM processor ISA - What the vendors choose to do with this is their own business.
With their out-of-band console, you can watch it boot from the very beginning.
Not affiliated, just sometimes use them when I need to play around with a physical box, and can't do so at work...