How much cooling do these racks need?
It could be a killer sales point if these servers need no cooling.
HP's new ARM-based Servers
71–76 of 76 posts
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#72I 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…
According to
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/arm_server_extension...
there's an extension for 32-bit ARM processors that allows them to address 40-bit memory (1TB RAM).
This before 64-bit processors (that should arrive in 2014)
Btw I dont know if this option is available in Calxeda/HP solutions.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#73No details or pricing whatsoever?
You can get details on the underlying server architecture from Calxeda's pages describing the system on chip, and the quad server boards that are in the initial HP design:
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#74I hope it has ECC RAM, as opposed to most competitors I've seen before (such as the atom based boxes)
Yes; it's a properly server oriented processor, with ECC, fast interconnect, large cache, etc.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#75Earlier 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.
Last I remember reading ARMv7 wasn't Popek/Goldberg valid. The Cortex-A15 is touted as adding this facility, no? Regardless, a 4G box is going to be a poor resource allocation environment for virtualized hosting, which is something closer to my point.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#76Earlier 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.
Last I remember reading ARMv7 wasn't Popek/Goldberg valid. The Cortex-A15 is touted as adding this facility, no? Regardless, a 4G box is going to be a poor resource allocation environment for virtualized hosting, which is something closer to my point.
Yes, not all ARMv7 instructions meet the Popek/Goldberg virtualization criteria. The project I'm working on uses dynamic binary translation to trap & interpret these instructions. This is how VMware works without virtualization extensions on x86.