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HP's new ARM-based Servers

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Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#41

Post by tmurray »

miratrix wrote: post #31
tmurray wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends entirely on where your bottlenecks are. If the bottleneck is entirely within your node, then this isn't going to be compelling. If you're doing something that's very light on the resources within your node (serving static content, etc) and your bottleneck is some other system somewhere else, then these sorts of machines could be compelling purely from a space/power POV.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#42

Post by jsn »

tmurray wrote: post #41
miratrix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends entirely on where your bottlenecks are. If the bottleneck is entirely within your node, then this isn't going to be compelling. If you're doing something that's very light on the resources within your node (serving static content, etc) and your bottleneck is some other system somewhere else, then these sorts of machines could be compelling purely from a space/power POV.

If your nodes are not bound on some local resource, you can as well just run them in virtualization containers on Xeon. The setup will be even more flexible than with (less powerful) ARMs.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#43

Post by lgeek »

I find it strange that they're using Cortex-A9 CPUs. I would have expected anyone going for the server market with ARM cores to use Cortex-A15, which has 40 bit addressing with PAE.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#44

Post by lgeek »

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…

I'm going to guess that by 'no virtualization ability', you probably mean no hardware acceleration for virtualization. That doesn't mean you can't have OS-level virtualization. In fact, I'm working on a hypervisor for BeagleBoard.

Plus, TrustZone has been hacked in the past to implement virtualization.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#45

Post by yuhong »

lgeek wrote: post #44
ajross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to guess that by 'no virtualization ability', you probably mean no hardware acceleration for virtualization. That doesn't mean you can't have OS-level virtualization. In fact, I'm working on a hypervisor for BeagleBoard. Plus, TrustZone has been hacked in the past to implement virtualization.

The reason hardware support for virtualization is necessary on x86 is only because of some design decisions dating back to the 80286.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#46

Post by yuhong »

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?

The fundamental flaw here I think is centralized purchasing.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#47

Post by [deleted] »

sounds wrote: post #5
atlbeer wrote: post #2

Here's a good article summarizing the HP site which does a horrid job explaining what it actually is http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_...

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…

[deleted]

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#48

Post by smithian »

yuhong wrote: post #45
lgeek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that by 'no virtualization ability', you probably mean no hardware acceleration for virtualization. That doesn't mean you can't have OS-level virtualization. In fact, I'm working on a hypervisor for BeagleBoard. Plus, TrustZone has been hacked in the past to implement virtualization.

The reason hardware support for virtualization is necessary on x86 is only because of some design decisions dating back to the 80286.

Can you elaborate?

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#49

Post by wmf »

lgeek wrote: post #43

I find it strange that they're using Cortex-A9 CPUs. I would have expected anyone going for the server market with ARM cores to use Cortex-A15, which has 40 bit addressing with PAE.

The A15 wasn't available when Calxeda designed the chip.

Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers

#50

Post by antoinehersen »

rovar wrote: post #26

Project Moonshot? What's wrong, "Project Vaporware" was taken?

From the Register article: "The hyperscale server effort is known as Project Moonshot, and the first server platform to be created under the project is known as Redstone, after the surface-to-surface missile created for the US Army, which was used to launch America's first satellite in 1958 and Alan Shepard, the country's first astronaut, in 1961."
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