HP Announces ARM-Based Server Line

sammcj writes with news that HP is developing servers based on 32-bit ARM processors from Calxeda. Their current model is only a test setup, but they plan to roll out a finalized design by the middle of next year. "HP's server design packs 288 Calxeda chips into a 4U rack-mount server, or 2,800 in a full rack, with a shared power, cooling, and management infrastructure. By eliminating much of the cabling and switching devices used in traditional servers and using the low-power ARM processors, HP says it can reduce both power and space requirements dramatically. The Redstone platform uses a 4U (7-inch) rack-mount server chassis. Inside, HP has put 72 small server boards, each with four Calxeda processors, 4GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache. Each processor, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design, runs at 1.4GHz and has its own 80 gigabit cross-bar switch built into the chip"

Comments

Re:it's begining of the end for x86 (hopefully)

[serviscope_minor]

It's still amazing how well x86 + Windows works, taking in account all the hacks and legacy cruft involved.

The legacy cruft is often microcoded out and runs rather slowly. The modern x64 isn't too bad.

However, it's delightful to finally see ARM being more and more utilized outside the smartphone category, in PCs.

Not just ARM. Both SPARC and MIPS (compatible but independent) have now made showings in the top 10 supercomputers.

Alike most DSLAMs

[La Gris]

This type of setup is already used in Most DSLAMs. Full rack, 2PSU, cooliing, 24 or 48 port (x)DSL cards with ARM CPU as independent servers, Internal management card and network switch. Think of blade server racks.

Aggregate I/O performance

[Junta]

FC/FCoE/iSCSI all deliver much much lower aggregate I/O performance than coordinated use of direct attached storage. Google, Hadoop, GPFS, Lustre all facilitate that sort of usage. You will in any of those remote disk architecture have an I/O bottleneck along the line.

That said, I would presume netboot at least would be there, and from there you can do iSCSI in software certainly. FCoE tends to be a bit pickier, so they may not be able to do that in the network fabric provided.

On the whole, I'm skeptical still yet. So far ARM has proved itself when low power is critical and performance. I'm not sure if performance per watt is going to be impressive (e.g. if it hypothetically takes 10% of the power of a competitor and gave 9% of the performance, that can work well for places like cell phones but perhaps not so much for a datacenter). ARMv8 may make things very interesting though...