31–40 of 94 posts
Given ARM reigns the mobile space, and if it gains traction in the server market, it will put tremendous pressure on the PC market which lies in between.
I'm all for x86/intel competition but I don't see this as real savings yet?
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.
Take a look at the HP Moonshot servers for comparison: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/... 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…
Actually the closest comparison seems to be Viridis. 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.…
Given ARM reigns the mobile space, and if it gains traction in the server market, it will put tremendous pressure on the PC market which lies in between.
My predictions are that we will hit cloud disillusionment soon and people are going to rediscover the benefits of home storage and GPU power.
I couldn't find anything on pricing and availability, but, despite my enthusiasm for Windows-proof servers, I am not sure if having a lot of discrete servers in a 3U enclosure is better than having a lot of containers running on, say, 3 1U servers. Containers (or even VMs) are much more manageable than 48 physically distinct machines (to say nothing of having 4 on each board, meaning an upgrade or defect on one means…
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?
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.
I think x86/amd64 virtualization has made ARM a much less compelling option for servers than what it would have been a few years ago. 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 hig…
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.
I think x86/amd64 virtualization has made ARM a much less compelling option for servers than what it would have been a few years ago. 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 hig…
> In reality I could fill a rack with these arm blades or have two quad socket x86/amd64 servers be equivalent or better 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.
Is there an engineering reason for this, or is there just not enough volume for those boards to be economical?
> 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. This looks like a perfect example of the kind of violation a trademark owner is required to pursue to protect the trademark: Dell uses "ARM server" here to mean "a server that is RISC-based and advanced" rather than "a server […