Slashdot Mirror
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."
I can see myself using an ARM-based linux server in the home.
If they get proper business support from some largeish vendor pushing out rack machines then that'd be great too. All the servers I admin currently run x86 from Intel. Saying that, when idling, they're not terribly power hungry; but arm boxes should be a lot better.
Lowering power consumption is never a bad idea for your bottom line, as long as the performance-per-watt is acceptable. The first thing I thought was that it would be useful for larger clusters of machines if the performance isn't on-par with power6/x86 server chips. At the end of the day the deal breaker will be just how much performance you can get out of their server chips, which will affect what type of environment they're suitable for.
Performance per watt.
ARM gives performance at without massive cost of watt. Just scaling it up would mean performance.
ARM already got performance on par with x86, but uses less then 10 times the power. Now, if people are stupid to make use of x86 for servers would not a upscaled ARM cluster beat the crap out of it? Uses less power, faster.
And RISC means power, what buzzwords are you listening too?
Does this mean I'll be able to run my 10TB Oracle data warehouse on this,
Most probably not, and definitely not if Oracle doesn't generate ARM binaries...
or would I more likely use them in my webserver farm to save on power bills?
That's a possibility too.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
ARM already got performance on par with x86
Pull out the benchmarks, or that's complete BS.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I'd say that ARM is on par with x86 Hz vs Hz, or even better. The problem is that ARM is barely past 1 GHz while x86 is pushing towards 4 GHz. There are just now ARM processors with two high performance cores, while x86 processors are pushing past 12 cores and climbing. There are no ARM cores that I know of that does hyper threading, while almost all x86 cores do at least two way multithreading.
So.. I'd say that we will be using x86 for high performance servers for quite some time still.
However.. putting litterally thousands of low performance ARM cores in a 3U enclosure would certainly be good for some server applications.
Depending on your needs you can already use ARM servers. This http://www.open-rd.org/ is perfect as a dns server, dhcp server, firewall, mail server or even a webserver on a small network. I really like using those devices as 'physical virtual servers': ideal as an isolated, task oriented server for tasks that do not need a full fledged server.
I have one of these at home (with Debian on it and a 2TB hard disk attatched).
Then port Windows to both.
Microsoft will then have an arm-and-a-leg OS.
ARM is David. x86 is Goliath.
Most of us inherently favor David.
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.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Low end stuff.
And the racks upon racks of servers that average 10% capacity. Why couldn't many of them be ARM-based? (Except for the fact that they run Windows.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
They can be excellent as fileservers/cloud stuff, given their performance per watt ratio, dont expect that a computing intensive task is run on them (they are barely 2-3x as fast as an atom in their recent incarnations, but at a fraction of the power an atom uses)
but they are an excellent choice for io intensive cloud like tasks where you need a load of machines and have a vfs sitting on top of it.
You can get a MIPS64 netbook today, it's called Lemote Yeeloong.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
IOW, benchmarks or you're full of shit.
Benchmarks are BS too. Better to check out the in-depth analyses in Microprocessor Report (that was certainly the source for this sort of thing back when I was doing this sort of hardware).
Generally speaking (at a very gross approximation!) the biggest factor in speed seems to be feature size, and ARM cores run cooler than x86 cores. ARM have focussed on the low-power end of the market far more than Intel and AMD (who have been duking it out at the high-speed end) and this means that for some applications, their stuff is absolutely best. I don't know whether that's true for server-class computing; the lower power consumption will get better packing densities but whether that will compensate for the reduced computational power I just don't know.
Of course, a good benefit in the "small server" market would be being able to run normal workloads without active cooling (i.e., fans) in a normal room. That would save loads on power and aircon. (And I know for one thing that there are ARM cores that can cope with very wide temperature variations. It's impressive when you see someone torturing a CPU with a hairdryer and – straight after – some dry-ice...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
After many years, Intel finally has some challenge. And for those of you who doubt what ARM chips are able to do, I'll tell that I've been surfing the web and chatting through MSN Messenger on an Acorn A7000+, which runs on a 48 Mhz ARM 7500FE. Now, if they can raise that to 2ghz, I see very nice performance while still retaining a fairly low power consumption.
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
I requested a small server for a project at work - the minimum my shop buys is an 8-way,16GB beast. I need to run 1 single-threaded app, and I get this.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
MIPS and PowerPC. It ran competitively on most of these architectures, but the problem was always the missing third party software. If Microsoft just wants ARM servers for internal use, this wouldn't be a problem. Other people could probably manage too. Server software on Windows tends to be either written by Microsoft, open source, developed in-house, or provided by a small number of other companies. The first three mean it can just be recompiled. The fourth means that MS can apply some pressure to encourage an ARM port relatively easily.
A lot of the win32 API makes stupid 32-bit-and-little-endian assumptions, so Windows hasn't been ported to any big endian systems (PowerPC and MIPS are biendian, and Windows ran them in little endian mode). The 32-bit assumptions are hacked in win64 by using an LLP64 model, which breaks the assumption that sizeof(void*) <= sizeof(long). This is not guaranteed by the spec, but since it's true for pretty much every platform in existence before Win64, a lot of people assume that it is.
ARM is 32-bit and little endian, so userland Windows software should be pretty trivial to port. The only real difference you might notice is that ARM doesn't support unaligned loads, while x86 does (it's just really slow). An ARM OS can trap the exception caused by an unaligned load and emulate it, so even code that depends on it could work, just slowly. The only time you'll notice this in C code is if you are doing a lot of pointer casting - if the compiler can tell that it's an unaligned load, it will do two aligned loads, and shift-and-mask the results together. This is not exactly fast, but it's faster than an OS trap.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What's the point of a Beowulf cluster if it doesn't cause the lights to dim when you're performing your mad scientist calculations?
threadeds blog
ARM cores have both cache and pipelines, y'know? But lets find those benchmark results by making them ourselves:
Using one core on an AMD X2 2,8GHz and an ARM Cortex A8 core at 600MHz on a beagleboard, I've done some tests. Cache-optimized matrix multiplication of two matrices at 600x600 takes 0.45 seconds on the AMD, and 4.57 seconds on the A8. That's about 10x slower. However, the A8 (in an OMAP3530 package) produces just under 1W of heat. The TDP for the AMD is 65W, but since it's dual-core let's take half of that, plus an additional 20% fuzz factor because the TDP is the maximum rating.
By this slightly fuzzy, synthetic but memory-heavy benchmark, the performance-per-watt difference is about 2,5x in favor of the ARM Cortex A8 core. One core of an AMD X2 would have to put out below 10W to beat the A8. By my fuzzy math that would mean a TDP of 25W or below for the processor.
There you go, you're welcome! :)
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
I have a Marvell openrd-client. This thing has the guts of a Sheevaplug except it comes in a fancier case, uses a separate wall wart, has onboard video, more peripherals and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive inside.
I've got a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive poked inside and Debian Linux installed, and it acts as a file server, music server, torrent downloader, etc. Pulls about 8 watts from the wall, though I've got video disabled, second ethernet disabled, etc. Couldn't be happier with the thing.
MS provides email, Outlook, SQL and web server applications. Why would you need anything more?
No sig today...
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?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
That used to be true when transistors were expensive and memory was fast. The choice used to be between more CPU registers with less instructions (RISC) or less CPU registers and more instructions (CISC). Today transistors are cheap and memory is slow, so the more things you put on die (within reason) the better. It used to be that multiplication was considered too expensive to put in the ALU of a RISC processor, or barrel shifters, today this is simply not true. In fact even RISC processors have multiply-add instructions today (e.g. Power), more complex than what you see in even a CISC like x86.
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.
Thing is, quite cheap and rather small laptops based on Intel CULV chips showed up recently; some of them certainly can do 10h, perhaps there are some with 12h. And they are fast, if needed.
On top of that, if I look at announcements of ARM netbooks - even though they will be purposely quite limited machines, it doesn't appear like manufacturers want a price reflecting that. Certainly not as long as there's not much competition yet, as long as they can offer it as a "premium" machine. Which has a big chance of killing them altogether...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Microsoft would just use Windows CE as a base, and port IIS and SQL Server to it easy enough.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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
The original XBox used a 700MHz celeron. The XBox 360 uses PPC.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
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.
Mine came from Nu Horizons, an electronic component distributor - http://www.nuhorizons.com/ - part # is 003-RD0004.
They're out of stock, but they seem to allow qty. 1 orders with a 2 week manufacturer lead time - you can try ordering one and see what happens.
However looking at Globalscale's site, it looks like they've now depreciated the openrd-client and openrd-base, and now have the "openrd-ultimate" which has a PCIe slot sticking out of it where the SD card slot used to be, and a MicroSD slot added by the audio connectors. Nu Horizons might sell that instead, but I can't find it.
If the rumors I hear are true from Microsoft developers, Microsoft is fully committed to moving their applications to the .NET platform. All of that stuff is compiled to an intermediate, interpreted bytecode that runs in a VM, just like Java. So actually, it is very portable. Portable enough that one of the applications I wrote in C#.NET and compiled in Visual Studio on a 32-bit platform ran unmodified on Ubuntu 64-bit with Mono. They may still do some low-level things here and there, but I suspect that if they really need to, they can port to another processor without having to reinvent the wheel.
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.