Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers • Hacker News Board

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#41

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

fierarul wrote: post #8

What exactly is stopping ARM boards to have high IO? Just allow people to use a normal 2.5" SSD or even m2 and you have a really nice machine! For example, the latest Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU which is faster than my 1st machine (and maybe even my 2nd and 3rd) but is severly handicaped by the IO speed which is limited to USB (plus, all the USB ports and Ethernet using the same controller for extra slowness).…

Demand mostly. Also the way ARM does I/O is a bit different, that said, a memory mapped "smart" disk controller is pretty straight forward, the trick is getting access to the memory bus crossbar switch inside the chip. Bolting one on, all of your peripherals go through one memory bus.

What would be really interesting is if ARM introduces a way to use a high speed serial bus (think PCIe) which would allow for the development of a 'south bridge' type IO chipset for ARM machines.

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#42

Post by pcwalton » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 3:54 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

This is a http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php ODroid XU4 if you are wondering, I have one of their ODroid C boards and find it quite useful.

Seconding this. I use an ODROID XU3 (the earlier model) for testing Servo on multicore ARM and it's surprisingly fast, especially if your workload parallelizes. It's amazing how much CPU/GPU power you can get for $75, and since it's both parallel, cheap, and based on a mainstream consumer SoC I would love for it to be a harbinger of things to come :)

What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics (the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#43

Post by pcwalton » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #37

scoopr wrote: post #7

Well, its nice that ARM servers are coming available, even if they don't seem quite that desirable as they are. Could be nice for ARM build CI server. I wonder how the performance compares to say the scaleway[0] offerings, I would guess the SD card storage doesn't compare favourably. Given that there are 6eur/mo one core intel dedis[1][2] and 16eur/mo 8core with 8gig ram and vastly more disk space[3], these seem a bi…

Anything with SD card storage will perform very poorly. Anything that uses USB 2.0 as a system bus will perform like dogshit. Using real SSDs on a real SATA channel makes an immense difference, not just in performance but also in system stability. SD cards are meant to be linearly loaded up with files, dumped to disk, then erased. They do not handle highly random write loads with sectors of extreme write intensity ve…

ODROIDs come with eMMC storage, and they recommend using it over the SD card for this reason. (I haven't tried it, since the workloads I'm using it with tend to be CPU bound and SD cards are so much easier to find, so I don't know how much of an improvement it is.)

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#44

Post by dogma1138 » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

tinco wrote: post #19

Everyone who says this is a bad price for the hardware, please link me to any other bare metal server for rent at 16e/mo. I haven't seen it, not at Hetzner, nor anywhere else. You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.

Dual-Core CPU AMD Athlon Regor 3.2GHz 3GB RAM 500GB SATA 5TB Traffic 40$ on serverpronto

Simmilar setup with 2GB RAM goes for 19 GBP on 1on1 in the UK

HP ProLiant DL120 with a Dual Core Xeon 4GB of RAM and 2TB storage goes for 29 Euro's on Leaseweb...

Is it 16? nope, but don't even compare 16 Euro's for a didcated cell phone with no storage, no IO and very poor performance is like leasing a TI calculator as a compute cloud....

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#45

Post by lesingerouge » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #40

lesingerouge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job. I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.

Would it beat a pair of $5 VMs from digital ocean though?

I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.