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Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

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Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#3

Post by rwmj »

pavlov wrote: post #2

The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.

If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#4

Post by lesingerouge »

rwmj wrote: post #3
pavlov wrote: post #2

The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform. If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

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.

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#5

Post by pavlov »

rwmj wrote: post #3
pavlov wrote: post #2

The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform. If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".

Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)

I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).

Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#6

Post by rwmj »

lesingerouge wrote: post #4
rwmj wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform. If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

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.

I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/odroid-xu-arrives/

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#7

Post by scoopr »

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 bit expensive.

[0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ [1] http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml [2] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-scg2 [3] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#8

Post by fierarul »

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).

A quad-core ARM with a RAM slot supporting at least 8GB, a giga Ethernet port, 4 separate USB ports and a SATA connection would be glorious.

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#9

Post by rwmj »

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).…

For 32 bit ARM, it seems to be shortcuts in the SoC design a.k.a there's a reason some boards cost under $50.

There exist some designs with real SATA (eg. Cubietruck) but those have poor CPUs (A7), and there exist many designs with SATA-via-USB which is never going to be fast. Also micro SD cards have abysmal performance for the sort of random I/O that operating system root filesystems have.

Luckily the situation in 64 bit ARM server land is much better. The APM Mustang and AMD designs have a combination of fast cores and properly engineered I/O subsystems. Real SATA, multiple 10gigE and 1gigE interfaces, PCIe, etc.

Re: Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers

#10

Post by lazyjones »

rwmj wrote: post #3
pavlov wrote: post #2

The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.

I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform. If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.

> I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this?

People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU usage, i.e. static pages and similar.

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