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HP's new ARM-based Servers

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Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#31

Post by miratrix »

tmurray wrote: post #28
jsn wrote: post #27

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... : The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m. A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10…

You assume the application is compute limited and that the extra performance on the Xeon translates into extra performance on a given application. That's probably not a good assumption for this kind of workload.

You're going to be I/O bound (network or disk), memory bound, or compute bound. It's hard to imagine the Redstone systems besting Xeon based servers in any of the three.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#32

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #30
Donch wrote: post #23

I think this is a highly significant move by ARM. It's amazing when you speak to datacentre people and they tell you how much of your server charges go on electricity and cooling. My recent example was £200 extra/year for an additional Opteron 6128 and £400 extra/year for the increased power usage from that processor! There is an obvious gap in the market for low power, low heat generating, high memory throughput ser…

No virtualization ability. No addressibility of more than 4G is a killer for some apps. CPU horsepower density isn't quite as high as they say: at 72 quad-core A9's per rack unit vs. 6.4 Xeons in a comparable 10U blade server. A Nehalem clocks about 3x faster and runs about 1.5-2x faster per clock than the A9 for "random server logic" workloads, so this appears to be higher by only a little bit. Power consumption isn…

[deleted]

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#35

Post by ceejayoz »

trebor wrote: post #25

I wonder if the Redstone part of the name came from a secret Minecraft fan at HP's headquarters. I hope it succeeds, just to give Intel a run for their money. I really think that ARM is the future of computing (including the desktop).

Given the "Project Moonshot" bit, I'd imagine it's from the Redstone rockets that launched the Mercury astronauts into space.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#36

Post by wmf »

jsn wrote: post #27

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... : The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m. A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10…

By my calculations the Redstone config has 6400 cores and the traditional one has 4800 cores. But discussing such vague claims is pretty pointless anyway.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#37

Post by jonknee »

xtacy wrote: post #20
jonursenbach wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is up there too. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003O6G5TW/ref=s9_hps_bw_g6...

Google too: https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/

That's intentional. They'd rather not give out a bunch of Google Accounts usernames (which would also be a lot of Gmail users).

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#38

Post by jsn »

wmf wrote: post #36
jsn wrote: post #27

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... : The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m. A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10…

By my calculations the Redstone config has 6400 cores and the traditional one has 4800 cores. But discussing such vague claims is pretty pointless anyway.

The original Calxeda reference design from last year was a 2U rack-mounted chassis that crammed 120 processors (and hence server nodes)

also:

HP can cram three rows of these [4 CPU --jsn] ARM boards, with six per row, for a total of 72 server nodes

From that I conclude that in their calculations 1 CPU == 1 server.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#39

Post by tmurray »

jsn wrote: post #38
wmf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By my calculations the Redstone config has 6400 cores and the traditional one has 4800 cores. But discussing such vague claims is pretty pointless anyway.

The original Calxeda reference design from last year was a 2U rack-mounted chassis that crammed 120 processors (and hence server nodes) also: HP can cram three rows of these [4 CPU --jsn] ARM boards, with six per row, for a total of 72 server nodes From that I conclude that in their calculations 1 CPU == 1 server.

Each CPU is a separate node in this configuration--separate DRAM, IO, etc.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#40

Post by Andys »

wmf wrote: post #12
sounds wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to predict the future, but if HP thinks it can win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details, that's not a good sign. I make the IT purchasing decisions for my company, and I know what an ARM CPU is, and why it's a good idea. Therefore, I know that HP's approach doesn't make sense: ARM hasn't been proven in this market. Therefore, customers and vendors (like HP) need to work very closel…

...win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details... Hasn't the enterprise market worked that way for years?

This. is why Itanium server revenue has exceeded entire AMD server revenue in recent years.
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