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ARM-Based Servers Coming In 2011
markass530 writes with this from the EE Times: "Arm Holdings chief executive officer Warren East told EE Times Wednesday that servers based on ARM multicore processors should arrive within the next twelve months. The news confirms previous speculation stemming from Google's acquisition of Agnilux and a recent job advertisement posted by Microsoft. East said that the current architecture, designed for client-side computing, can also be used in server applications."
And how about small businesses?
I bet those millions of servers handling an office of five people can happily do with half the horsepower and 10% of the power use.
And I'm not just thinking of my own business.... with a 1.8 MHz or so Intel based computer idling most of the time handling the e-mail and files of my staff and me.
I favour anyone who can build and deliver a laptop with 12 hours battery live. In addition, a low power ARM server for office work (small and middle enterprise) is a nice to have, too. I think most users don't give a piece if it's x86 or ARM, as long as their applications are running and it's a good deal. I, for myself, am really glad finally see any innovation in desktop CPUs. I thought in 20 years we will still be using x86 compatible CPUs.
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I've always thought that the x86 architecture is a dead horse beaten to the speed of light. It is the 21th century and we need something slightly better than rocks and sticks and x86 to throw at the old monstrosity known as computation. If we're still going to depend on x68 in 20 years I'd rather kill myself by banging my head against an x86 chip.
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You don't need multiple fast cores necessarily - it depends on the server.
You do need good I/O on most servers. The earlier benchmarks of the Sun T1 was a nice example of this. IIRC 8 cores, each with two threads of execution, back when x86 was single and dual core. The cores were wimpy, but on many server applications (web, file, I believe database) it beat x86.
You need a lot of cores, yes, but they don't need to be powerful for most server applications - since most are parallel.
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The problem is more the apps, windows itself could probably be ported without too much trouble but most windows apps are likely to have code that makes x86 specific assumptions and are closed source so only the vendors can fix them.
Emulation is an option but unless arm cores start performing a LOT better than intel cores of a similar power envelope that won't help much.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Another advantage might be lowering the number of components. A Beagleboard would make a great low-volume server, except that it lacks any way other than USB for connecting disks and network adaptors. The same ARM core with the GPU removed and a couple of SATA and GigE controllers added would be a great SMB server platform. You could pop the OS and most apps in the flash and connect an external disk for served files. With the disk spun down, you'd be using under 2W for the rest of the system.
Performance per Watt is a useful metric, but performance-that-you-actually-use per Watt is a better one. There's no advantage to making the machine take 10W and be 100 times as fast if it's already powerful enough for your needs.
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But in this case that's a good thing. It suggests that they have designed portable code (it was one of the goals of the NT architecture) so they should be able to move to another platform.
MS provides email, Outlook, SQL and web server applications. Why would you need anything more?
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As the cost of energy continues to rise (due to purely political reasons rather than any actual scarcity, which is sad) there's going to be more and more demand for computing equipment with low power consumption. ARM fits that requirement nicely ... and it's all going to be running Linux, even if Microsoft enters the game.
Why?
Windows running on ARM would suffer from the same (imho perceived) problem that desktop Linux on x86 has: it wouldn't be able to run Windows x86 binaries. In fact, for Microsoft it would actually be worse because they'd have to deal with irate customers who thought they'd be able to pop in that CD and install some application they already own.
Linux has been playing this one well by establishing a large base of open source software that can be built on any platform. Combine this with your favorite APT or YUM repository and what do you get? The equivalent of an "app store" which is something the world is now quite familiar with. Linux for the win!/p?
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ARM currently supports 4 GB of memory since the ISA is 32-bits. Full 64-bit addessing support is years away. Interim "PAE" extensions will be just as ugly and unused as the x86 PAE.
I'm already running an Arm based server. It's called a QNAP NAS and the TS419P runs a Marvell Feroceon CPU "Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)" (cpuinfo).
It's running Debian Lenny (2.6.30-2-kirkwood) and thanks go to the Debian Arm team and Martin Michlmayr. Runs great.
Alastair
Why Windows? I thought we were talking about servers here.
If I see another idiot claiming that LLP64 is a "hack" for the sake of endian compatibility, I'm going to smash something. Yes, Windows uses LLP64 most of the time. That's because too many developers used things like DWORD in their structure definitions, which would be broken if DWORD was suddenly 64 bits wide.
And anyone who has ever made the "assumption" that sizeof(void*) = sizeof(long) is an idiot. Sorry, but if you rely on undefined behavior in the standard you accept the results that come from that result. You shouldn't ever be putting pointers into longs anyway.
The MIPS/Alpha/PowerPC failure of Windows was caused by 1 thing only:
The disgustingly cheap price of the Pentium Pro.
For $10,000 dollars you could have the same (two socket) performance as a $40,000 Netpower, or a $30,000 DEC Alpha.
Intel's volume and engineering skill is what made porting to anything except Intel a waste of time, except on some very special applications.
The fact that MIPS/Alpha/PowerPC where all 64bit CPU platforms back in 1996 should incense anyone who bought into the Itanium myth. Thank GOD we had AMD around to force Intel to move to x64.
If I see another idiot claiming that LLP64 is a "hack" for the sake of endian compatibility, I'm going to smash something. Yes, Windows uses LLP64 most of the time. That's because too many developers used things like DWORD in their structure definitions, which would be broken if DWORD was suddenly 64 bits wide.
Presumably, if Windows went LP64 tomorrow, this wouldn't mean that DWORD is suddenly 64-bit wide. It would just mean that DWORD would become a typedef for unsigned int, rather than unsigned long.