Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem
dell.com
dell.com
I'm looking forward to benchmarks of new ARM server CPU (esp. AMDs), but in the past comparing scale out ARM boxes and tradtional servers in the same space has:
1. Been much more more in favor x86/amd64 under low load (much lower latency for users)
2. Been pretty similar under very high concurrent loads
3. Not had compelling differentiation in power consumption
In reality I could fill a rack with these arm blades or have two quad socket x86/amd64 servers be equivalent or better...
I hope this changes for the sake of consumer options, but I need to see benchmarks + power usage stats to believe it.
That said, I'm not convinced ARM is ready for server applications either. This might be interesting to hosting companies that want to sell low-end dedicated servers, though. (OVH already does something similar with Kimsufi, I believe?)
All of the ARM server products in existence today are basically demos. Presumably the "select customers" offered HP "moonshot" and Dell "copper" are working on software ports and automation infrastructure for an aarch64 future.
Quad socket x86 is still prohibitively expensive, but in the price per performance assessment you might be right (at least if you do not consider the expensive high-end x86 CPUs). The ARM blades look interesting for bare metal clouds though.
Less expensive then a rack of these new ARM blades.
Still, lets take quad socket off the table, 4 2U dual socket x86/amd64 boxes still is a better value proposition.
Not if you're aiming at a good density (processing power per rack). But there are many blade options (8 boards in 3U, or 4 in 2U from Supermicro e.g.) for x86 that will fit the bill, yes.
The cost for the vendor should be much lower with ARM CPUs though (the CPUs will probably be dirt cheap, while Intel's aren't).
Context: I'm talking about relative to ARM blades, not denser x86 options.
>The cost for the vendor should be much lower with ARM CPUs though (the CPUs will probably be dirt cheap, while Intel's aren't).
Maybe for the vendor, but these ARM blades boxes are expensive for the consumer!
Lets compare two 2U boxes, one with 48 1.6 GHz ARM SoC and one with dual six-core Xeons with SMT (HT) at lets say 2.8 GHz, that is 48 logical cores. The x86/amd64 box in this comparison is:
0. Much cheaper!
1. Low latency at low loads
2. Similar throughput and latency at high loads
3. Uses less power
4. Easier to maintainIs there an engineering reason for this, or is there just not enough volume for those boards to be economical?
The CPUs & Chipsets to run quad socket are marked up much higher then the dual / single socket options.
What? You can get a 1U, 4x16 core, 256GB server for ten grand. http://www.thinkmate.com/system/a+-server-1042g-tf
Just having 32 logical cores doesn't mean much for performance. Hyperthreading is not magical, dual quad core cpus is still 8 cores, with potentially some minor performance gains from the hyperthreading depending on the application.
As a systems guy I love the concept, but I'm a bit sad at the implementation. I would have loved to see the back plane of these things connect to a 'switch module' and take the connectors off the front. Basically a 48 port GBE switch with quad 10GbE uplinks out the "end" of the case would have been much nicer. Installing a nice SDN stack in the switch hardware such that one could virtualize the switch topology on the fly and you've got a box that you can configure in lots of ways and still get some economies of scale in both the CPU and switch infrastructure. Install a 24 port 10GbE switch on the top of the rack, and you've to 6 "copper" (18U), 24 port switch (1U), for a rack with 288 hosts, 2.3T of RAM, 288T of storage, and assuming a non-blocking 24 port switch 1. 883Mbits between any two hosts. Add a 1U boot/config management server into the rack and that is a heck of a gizmo.
Not all businesses need to write scalable software, because their current technology stack is just good enough and will always fit to one beefy machine, but on the other hand it will never fit on one ARM server module.
ps. hardware is cheap, while engineering work isn't
Where it gets tricky is if it's something written for an environment that itself has no ARM port yet, such as the JVM.
In long run having scalable software is win, but most of businesses will do just fine with unscalable software and good backup strategy, which they would need with ARMs anyways.
These boxes have internal slots for 45 blades. The current generation blades are Atoms and run a variety of Linux OS offerings. Future blades will be geared towards memcache, GPU, and other types of clusters. I got a couple of these at work for eval a little while back, and it's a pretty interesting package.
http://www.boston.co.uk/solutions/viridis/default.aspx
Both have 12 cards per shelf, each card containing four quad-core ARM processors. The Dell Copper cards are a bit beefier, at 1.6GHz and 8GB and 1.4GHz vs. 4GB for the BL Viridis, OTOH, the Viridis processors are 64-bit and the shelf is 2U instead of 3U, which might more than make up for the other differences.
At that density, the big differentiator is likely to be power (and therefore heat). Viridis claims 5W per server, which is even better than the SiCortex boxes I worked on. I don't see a number for Copper, so my gut tells me it's probably more. The question is how much more.
There is too little information provided on the two examples to be more precise, otherwise I would have gone into it. All we know is the Boston machine is EnergyCore-based - now that could be a 1000 which is Cortex A9 based, or 2000 based which is A15 based - a 3 minute look didn't make it clear which one you were talking about and which servers are based on what. The Dell system just says it's using a Marvell Armada XP. No more information. The Armada XP is (I think) based on a modified A15 core, but of course they won't say this anywhere. I'm guessing this because the XP range claims "64bit memory" which I suppose is their way of saying it has a 64bit physical address space - a feature of the A15 range. Though of course Marvell have an ARM license that would allow them to do something crazy like add PAE to an A9 based core. But I think that's unlikely.
Enough research for you? I would say the only real way to gauge the performance difference between the two is to try your particular application on it.
http://www.apm.com/news/appliedmicro-announces-general-avail...
http://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-gene...
To simply put, the server market has longed for a low power part for certain type of usage scenario. And Intel will soon has that covered.
I do know that in the datacenter we are colo'd, the vast majority of stuff hosted on the dedicated servers there could just as well be hosted on a $5 ARM board. A lot of companies hire complete servers for hosting a website which gets 2 visitors/month. This is also my experience as a long term devop (used to be fulltime, now parttime); servers I maintain, even clusters I maintain, can be hosted on a few $ ARM boards. They want dedicated because it gives them a sense of security and not being 'disturbed' by other sites so an ARM 'server' would suit well in that case. With the power consumption difference and bare metal costs, it's many $100s vs a few $10 per month for the client.
Edit: somewhere in my brain i thought I saw very cheap Atom servers and I did; http://www.ovh.nl/dedicated_servers/isgenoeg_2g.xml . Currently in the OVH sold out mode, but when they are back i'll try one to see how it holds up with one of those minimal sites.
ARM has the advantage in Smartphone and Tablet where there are no software compatibility concern, and it is working at 100s mW range. In Servers these two advantage disappeared.
I hope that'll change as you say because I love the price ;)
And Why would anyone want one when a Celeron or Pentium is only $20 bucks more expensive but perform a lot faster still?
IMO the Acer C720 chromebook is the best deal around currently; just put linux on it and replace the 16GB SSD with a larger one, performance should be even better than the 2010 MBA AFAICT.
Things are definitely starting to get very interesting though, I'll be keeping a close eye on devices released in the next 6mo.
ARM is already extremely good for mobile applications. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they certainly seem to be catching up faster than Intel has been able to cut down on power.
I doubt Dell designed these speculatively. One or more Dell customers likely requested them.
Who are these customers, and what is their use case? That's what's likely interesting.
It will be interesting, I think around the 5 year mark, to see the industry case studies. Just because these projects were _announced_ does not mean they were in _heavy usage_ over the entire 1-2 year timeframe.
I'm all for x86/intel competition but I don't see this as real savings yet?
http://armservers.com/2012/06/18/apache-benchmarks-for-calxe...
This is hardly surprising to me. I worked on similar low-power high-density systems at SiCortex for a couple of years. High clock rates and big caches do improve performance, but they increase power consumption even more, so for a parallelizable workload a larger number of "wimpier" processors can do more work per watt.
I don't doubt that ARM does have a better power/performance ratio, but it's nowhere near 15x. Using such obviously misleading statistics leaves me suspecting it's way closer than that.
Just so happens that I have both an x86 box and an ARM box in my office. Maybe on my next day off (that I'm not stuffing my face with turkey) I'll run some benchmarks myself.
As for your 8051 example, it's bogus because that chip simply can't do the work. It can't run a real OS, and even if it could do that it couldn't keep even a single Ethernet or SATA port busy. Therefore you'd need a lot more nodes, each with their own network/storage/memory that don't come for free, rapidly wiping out any savings on the CPU alone before you even get to the high-node-count coordination problems that would make the whole thing fall flat on its face.
The whole issue here is not just absolute minimum power but balance. In a server environment, where the processor's job is about keeping ports full more than about pure number-crunching, you have to start with what kinds of ports you have. What processor and memory most exactly matches a commodity I/O profile, neither running over nor falling short, while consuming the fewest watts? Modern ARM chips are often a better answer to that question than anything Intel makes. It's a shame that some people who've invested many years in x86-specific expertise might find the market for those skills eroding as a result, but that's the harsh reality.
As for low-power x86 - HP's Moonshot is in the ballpark of ARM blade devices, and Baytrail pushes Intel even closer. ARM probably still wins, but the figures are nothing like 15x. And once you take fixed costs like disk and RAM into account, the difference ends up being even smaller.
ARM have done a great job of improving the performance of their cores. Intel have done a great job of cutting the x86 power budget. Given that nobody's really shipping ARM servers yet, it's still not clear who's going to come up with the better product. The problem that ARM face is that they not only have to be better, they have to be sufficiently better that it's worth the cost of porting in-house applications to a new architecture.
Although, a cost analysis might be required- I suspect that a more powerful CPU with a lot more disks may end up costing less (per unit of disk space vs total power consumption).
I got excited when I first saw the headline because the last time I looked I didn't see anything available in the hobbyist/small business price range.
However there is interesting hackable ARM hardware around. I would recommend looking at the CubieTruck, Mele A1000G Quad (make sure it's the "Quad" variant), and possibly the ODROID-XU. I write about these and others on my blog (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/)
If we could turn it into a NUMA machine with 48 CPUs, that would be a totally different story.
This particular version seems to only support 1Gbit Ethernet, so I don't know how well that will work.
Still, we're talking about 192 cores with 384 Gbytes of RAM, that's got to be useful for some kind of workloads. Can you get that kind of density with Intel or AMD?
The new Xeon Phi's will have an external DDR3 bus. It's a different beast, intended for a different usage, but I always loved to misuse technology ;-)
Seeing as you're going to be keeping 48 copies of the same OS in that memory whether you want to or not, you're going to need those 384G.
Them: crickets
My predictions are that we will hit cloud disillusionment soon and people are going to rediscover the benefits of home storage and GPU power.
There are a bunch of i.MX6-based boards w/ GigE, SATA, and a surprisingly strong GPU/VPU that, being very lower power consumption, are very well suited for always-on use. They also work well enough media playback, web browsing, etc.
You can see both AMD (APUs) and Intel (NUCs) aiming into that same target, but they'll face stiff competition - the ARM systems are much cheaper, about $100 for fully functional boards.
(Obviously there's a bunch of J2ME and other embedded implementations, but I assume that's not what you're looking for.)
> What is ARM?
> An advanced RISC machine (ARM) server employs small,
> low-power ARM processors, typically deployed as
> systems on a chip (SoC) to reduce space, power consumption
> and cost.
As Wikipedia says[1]:
"A trademark which is popularly used to describe a product or service (rather than to distinguish the product or services from those of third parties) is sometimes known as a genericized trademark[2]. If such a mark becomes synonymous with that product or service to the extent that the trademark owner can no longer enforce its proprietary rights, the mark becomes generic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
The point is that "ARM" as it is used in the text doesn't refer specifically to the products of the trademark owner. If such usage becomes acceptable, anyone could sell "ARM servers" and the trademark becomes useless.