Hacker News Reader

Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

From a CloudFlare article: "In our analysis, we found that even if Intel gave us the chips for free, it would still make sense to switch to ARM, because the power efficiency is so much better."

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/design/cloudflare-bets-a...

View on HN

Dated March 2018, mentions Qualcomm Centriq. December 2018: https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-chi...

This was after Qualcomm made a large investment in Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-raised-110m-from-fidelity...

Still no real benchmarks from the Qualcomm ARM boards Cloudflare is using, or availability to anyone else except Cloudflare. (Unlikely to ever happen now with the CPU being discontinued, seems pretty damn unlikely it was ever really very competitive. )

"ARM Takes Wing: Qualcomm vs. Intel CPU comparison"

https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/

Maybe you don't consider those "real" benchmarks, but they look like benchmarks to me.

Impressive: "With the NGINX workload [Falkor/AMD] handled almost the same amount of requests as the Skylake server. [Falkor/AMD] managed to get 214 requests/watt vs the Skylake’s 99 requests/watt"

It's not entirely clear what the power consumption is actually measuring. If it's not whole-system draw then it could be highly misleading. What is considered "CPU power" and what doesn't can vary (like does it include the memory controller? Or PCI-E controller? etc...)

Savings of 60W per CPU for equivalent performance works out to be say $60 per year in electricity.

However if your data centers are capacity constrained by total power supply, then you can double the capacity of your data center by going for a CPU that is twice as efficient (2x is the approximate difference that they measured between AMD and Intel).

Any tips on good/cheap ARM-based boards for a desktop system that would pay for themselves in electricity savings?

CloudFlare have unusual needs where ARM is very competitive, unlike desktop usage. From article:

“Every request that comes in to Cloudflare is independent of every other request, so what we really need is as many cores per Watt as we can possibly get,” Prince explained. “The only metric we spend time thinking about is cores per Watt and requests per Watt.” The ARM-based Qualcomm Centriq processors perform very well by that measure. “They've got very high core counts at very lower power utilization in Gen 1, and in Gen 2 they're just going to widen their lead.”

So the ideal arch for that would be non-CPU raw state machine, like Silego GreenPAK5 ASM cores, but they would better ask Dialog to remove all the peripherals, make state machines a bit bigger, and pack a thousands of ASM cores into one chip. And then sign NDA, get low-level proprietary format docs, and write the state machine code generator in Haskell or Coq.

Sounds fun, but still on your hypothetical scenario: all that complexity and proprietary cores and ndas would essentially tie them to the supplier of chips, essentially gagging the evolution of the whole CF architecture in the long run.

If the race is for request por watt alone, then you're probably right, but there's always real-world grittiness that needs to be addresses. that's how Google succeeded right? leveraging common platforms and hardware to their highly specialized software combo.

This. The ARM server class chips were mostly developed vendors of networking chips - Cavium, Qualcomm, Broadcom - for things like NAT boxes, programmable routers, Deep Packet Inspection, etc. They have a very high core count and proportionately less cache than standard server chips, but have been morphing to tackle more standard server loads.

Just get a x86 laptop if you care about energy efficiency that much. ARM desktops [0] that do what you want cost more than $1200.

[0] https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/

That's unfortunate. I found a Snapdragon 850 CPU but it seems it's only intended for Windows laptops.

You could strap together 3x ROCKPro64s (6 cores, 4GB, $80 each) to make a half decent docker swarm or kube, if you've got the right kind of parallelizable dev workload.

That's more or less what I was looking for. There's a SATA adapter for $10: https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-pci-e-to-dual-sata...

However, I'm not sure how it would perform compared to my somewhat obsolete AMD Athlon II X2 260, and other posts have convinced me the power savings wouldn't necessarily be significant enough to pay for it.

For the average desktop PC user (excluding gamers), the electricity costs for the CPU itself are probably largely irrelevant. A well-built modern PC will use less than 10-15W while idle (i.e. while you are reading this), meanwhile typical 27" displays will consume 30W or more.

> For the average desktop PC user (excluding gamers), the electricity costs for the CPU itself are probably largely irrelevant.

Using average German electricity price (which are some of the most expensive you can have) of 0.33 EUR / kWh, even if you are playing six hours a day with an average power consumption of 400 W (which you can only reach using a high-end PC and a big, bright monitor), you would still pay less than one Euro per day on electricity for that. The cost of the hardware makes that operating cost pretty much irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com