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Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

dell.com

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Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#71

Post by wmf »

ams6110 wrote: post #65
lazyjones wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd vouch for the 3rd possibility: the prices are artificially high because the customers who buy these configurations can afford to pay the premium.

This. Purchasers of the highest-end and/or costly experimental architectures tend to be research institutions or national labs that are using grant money.

In the case of quad-socket, it's actually enterprises running SQL databases and VMware consolidation where the cost of the software license exceeds the cost of the server.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#72

Post by wmf »

kogir wrote: post #70

I'm honestly not interested in all the reasons you won't use these servers. 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.

But that's equally damning. Dell, SeaMicro, Viridis, and Moonshot combined have almost no microserver case studies after 1-2 years. At what point do we end the experiment?

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#73

Post by lhl »

venomsnake wrote: post #35
happywolf wrote: post #19

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.

It won't - it may evolve or change the PC market but it won't pressure it. People will need computing powerhouses and big monitors. My predictions are that we will hit cloud disillusionment soon and people are going to rediscover the benefits of home storage and GPU power.

While there's a certain class of PCs that won't be much affected anytime soon (high-end gaming, workstations), ARM is already inching into the HTPC/home server space.

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.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#74

Post by venomsnake »

lhl wrote: post #73
venomsnake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't - it may evolve or change the PC market but it won't pressure it. People will need computing powerhouses and big monitors. My predictions are that we will hit cloud disillusionment soon and people are going to rediscover the benefits of home storage and GPU power.

While there's a certain class of PCs that won't be much affected anytime soon (high-end gaming, workstations), ARM is already inching into the HTPC/home server space. 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…

But that is exactly what I was saying - I don't care about which instruction set delivers my performance if it delivers it. So it won't put pressure on PCs - it will put pressure on x86 vendors. But the overall home server (and even workstation) market could increase. There is nothing that prevents high end GPU card working with arm CPU.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#75

Post by hapless »

voidlogic wrote: post #33

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…

The new aarch64 chips will support large amounts of memory and hardware virtualization. Despite low performance, the perf/watt and high memory density might be good enough to compete with x86. These exist only as engineering samples and emulators right now.

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.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#76

Post by notacoward »

mjg59 wrote: post #62
notacoward wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like they'd be a lot better per watt. 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…

Those figures are pretty close to being lies. A quad-core 3.3GHz Xeon that's only serving 6950 requests per second isn't going to be at anywhere near 100% utilisation, which means there's no way it's running at anywhere near its TDP. Same for the RAM. The x86 isn't going to be anywhere near 5W, but it's going to be significantly lower than 102W. They're also ignoring the fixed disk and PSU overheads, shifting the pow…

While what you say is true, it's also true that a lot of x86 servers sit idle precisely because they're network-limited. Wasting power that way is no different than wasting power any other way. That effect far outweighs any quibbling about whether the x86 really uses its full TDP (it won't) or needs more support chips that more than make up for it (it will), or what kinds of memory are involved, etc.

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.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#77

Post by lhl »

venomsnake wrote: post #74
lhl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's a certain class of PCs that won't be much affected anytime soon (high-end gaming, workstations), ARM is already inching into the HTPC/home server space. 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…

But that is exactly what I was saying - I don't care about which instruction set delivers my performance if it delivers it. So it won't put pressure on PCs - it will put pressure on x86 vendors. But the overall home server (and even workstation) market could increase. There is nothing that prevents high end GPU card working with arm CPU.

Err, ok, I think it's a given that the number of computing devices in a given home will increase over time. The GP, however, (and most of the threads here) are discussing how evolving ARM will impact/encroach on the existing x86 market.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#78

Post by theonewolf »

wmf wrote: post #72
kogir wrote: post #70

I'm honestly not interested in all the reasons you won't use these servers. 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.

But that's equally damning. Dell, SeaMicro, Viridis, and Moonshot combined have almost no microserver case studies after 1-2 years. At what point do we end the experiment?

Look here for some ideas on workloads: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/

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.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#79

Post by ghostdiver »

_delirium wrote: post #59
ghostdiver wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of infrastructure is not insta win for many(most.. ?) of businesses. Even if the price will be low and the power consumption will make a difference, still there will be HUGE cost of rewriting software. 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 serv…

That really depends on what kind of software you're running. There's a wide range of portable C/C++ Unix stuff that compiles fine on ARM. If you run a distro like Debian or ubuntu, you can just install the armhf port and have all that stuff. Where it gets tricky is if it's something written for an environment that itself has no ARM port yet, such as the JVM.

JVM or even Postgres can't run or do not perform well on a cluster, because this type of software takes advantage of shared memory, which is a blocker here. You can set up replication in Postgres or use some AMPQ for connecting JVMs, but still I would rather buy 3U machine with 4 CPUs and terabytes of ram for XXk$ rather than buy 3U container for ARM servers for XXk$ and spend XXXk$ on engineering work.

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.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#80

Post by ris »

notacoward wrote: post #41
ris wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you're getting the 64-bit thing from, but beyond that, comparing clock speeds between a Marvell Armada XP and the EnergyCore in the Boston machine is essentially meaningless.

Yes, you're right, the EnergyCore isn't 64-bit, and of course there are other differences between the architectures. Perhaps you could actually provide some information on how those differences might affect the two systems' capabilities. Or are you just here to snipe at others?

My role here is to prevent people going away with misguided information presented as fact and propagating it elsewhere. Or maybe I should just keep my great big trap shut and sit here feeling smug instead.

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.

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