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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"
Come on, guys, it's 2011. We're talking servers here. Forget SATA; throw in native iSCSI support (or fibre channel, but iSCSI would probably be significantly easier - if only because it uses standard Ethernet ports, rather than needing extra protocol support), and you'll have something that's a serious contendor in that space.
Think about it: with SATA, you have a bunch of hard disks, probably mostly disused, almost all of them performing atrociously (SATA is notorious for only being good with large sequential I/O). With iSCSI, you can hook up any disk array you damn well want, whatever its performance characteristics. Throw 10 Gb ethernet into the mix, and you have a winner (an expensive winner when you factor in the switch ports, but at least it gives the architect the option.)
What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
Would one be right in guessing that their Itanium based Integrity servers have been a disaster?
It's still amazing how well x86 + Windows works, taking in account all the hacks and legacy cruft involved. However, it's delightful to finally see ARM being more and more utilized outside the smartphone category, in PCs.
What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
They are probably scared of oracle "doing an Itanium" on them.
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.
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What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
HP stopped selling PA-RISC in 2008 and will end support at the end of 2013.
With the world moving to 64 bits to accomodate huge databases in memory and on disk they must be aiming for low hanging fruit here. Still, I'd like to get hold of one IF they ever convert it into a desktop version - would be nice to have a linux installation at home that doesn't pay homage to wintel in any way.
Are we going back to transputers again, then?
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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.
Léa Gris
As others have said PA-RISC has been discontinued for some time, so that is one reason. The other is I am pretty certain this thing is targeted at the Linux and [A-z]*.?BSD ecosystem, which has pretty strong support for ARM these days. The software stack for PA-RISC is just not there unless you want to run HPUX and the market for new HPUX deployments is probably quite small.
80GBps switch or not you not probably running your database on these things, but they sound like a perfect web farm in box solution. The software stack on the Linux and [A-z]*.?BSD is entirely there for that and is largely familiar to existing admins. Apache on Linux is still Apache on Linux even when ARCH=arm5tel
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Those processors run at only about 1.1 GHz, and ARM isn't quite as snappy on a "per GHz" basis as a typical Intel core because of the power-vs-speed tradeoff, so I figure that a 1.1 GHz ARM quad-core chip has about the same computer power as a single ~3GHz latest generation Intel Xeon core.
They say the can pack 288 quad core ARM processors into 4 rack units (with no disks). For comparison, HP sells blade systems that let you pack in 16 dual-socket blades into 10 rack units. Populate each socket with a 10 core Intel Xeon, and we're talking 320 cores. So for comparison, that's the equivalent of 72 cores per rack unit with ARM, vs 32 with Intel. The memory density is the other way around, with 288 GB per rack unit for ARM, and 614 GB with Intel.
So, if you have a an embarrassingly parallel problem to solve that can fit into 4GB of memory per node, doesn't use much I/O, and can run on Linux, this might be a pretty good idea.
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...
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This looks to me to be similar to Bluegene supercomputers. A Bluegene essentially consists of packaged PowerPC processors with a scalable high-performance switch interface on board. The two first current generation Bluegenes were using 32bit CPUs as well.
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Make a Minecraft themed one and I will find a reason to need it.
ARM presumably has patents on its core technologies, which are good for 15-20 years, and also its chip designs would be covered for at least 10 years, so anything compatible would have to be based on some fairly antiquated stuff.
AFAIK, royalties to ARM are not very high in the first place - even though the company effectively gets royalties from several billion ARM chips, its profits over 3 months are only about £30 million, so it is unlikely that the per chip royalty cost is that high.
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all the hacks and legacy cruft involved.
ARM has quite a bit of its own hacks to get platforms running. Linus Torvalds had his own rant against this, as he is wont to do.
SSC
Industry support and familiarity, availability of compilers, direct support by large projects (Debian, Ubuntu), and simply brand familiarity. I mean if you are going to make an argument about PA-RISC you may as well make the same argument about MIPS and whatever Motorola and IBM are calling their chips these days while you're at it.
So, HP, are you really going to do this or should I just wait a few weeks and wait for the cancellation announcement?
'Cause recently you guys have been a little wishy-washy...
It probably works quite well for virtualization.
Where would this fit in the market? My first thought is things with high number of threads but low compute complexity like web servers or something but Oracle essentially flopped in that arena with their ultrasparc or whatever it was with a bunch of threads. It's possible ARM is very fast but I'm only accustomed to seeing it in set top boxes, phones, and such. My understanding is they're great on power consumption but not so great on compute speed...
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not at 32bit that maxes out at 4gb ram where is ARM 64?
...does it run Android?
We got an enclosure full of Transmeta blades, and the performance just sucked. I could see this MAYBE for a VDI solution for a lot of low-power users, but that's it.
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What kind of applications would this be used for. The only thing I can think of would be web hosting. Does KVM / Xen even work on ARM?
There wouldn't be any serious enterprise applications that would run on ARM (right now) are there? Java?
They could have named it Iceberg to really piss em off.
IBM POWER has a HUGE Linux following - and it's officially supported on all of IBMs machines, from the lowest eServer to the largest of their mainframes.
This is an example of how badly corporate sites fuck it up (my current employer is a perfectly good example).
The browser tells you which language is preferred - there's no need to hardcode it in a URL. And if they want to switch/override, put it in a fucking cookie.
www.hp.com/products/PRODUCTNUM. WTF is so hard about that?
sparc and mips are not compatible at all. They are big endian (mips can be little endian sometimes) load/store RISC processors with 32 GPRs (though sparc has register windows) and that's about it in terms of similarity.
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Dude I grew up in the 80s, remember the "bag" phones? it was like carrying a car battery. that doesn't change the fact it was the iPhone that mades phone a fashion item and brought about the whole "thin is in" bit. hell look at what laptops were like before the Air came along, they were like bricks!
It also doesn't change the fact that these bozos harping on about 'the death of X86" are still just wasting space. I mean what is the point? hell I get 6 hours of HD movie watching on my Brazos netbook thanks to it having a dual core PLUS a 40 stream processor GPU that all runs in a less than 9 watt envelope! And that isn't even as low as x86 can go, some of the high end Intel CULV can frankly just sip power and still give performance that is miles above anything ARM can provide.
The troll that got butthurt because i burst his little bubble about ARM coming along and killing X86 (and I'm sure in his mind taking "they who shall not be named" along with it) can waste his mod points but it don't change reality. NSTAAFL, if you get ARM up to X86-64 levels of performance all its battery saving will be gone right out the window. in fact i bet if one were to make an ARM CPU that kept up with the latest AMD and Intel chips it would probably suck MORE power than X86 simply because AMD and Intel have had a hell of a lot more experience in lowering power than they have had in cranking up that kind of performance.
I mean when you see the amount of data a new multicore X86 can crunch its truly amazing. If you'd have told me when i started out on the VIC or even when I got my first X86, which was a whole 60MHz, that we would have this much power on our desktops and even on the go I would have said you were insane. We have jumped to insane levels of performance in just this last decade, going from barely 1Ghz to 4Ghz multicores with GPU performance built in.
ARM is great for mobile where power is everything, although frankly after getting to play with an ARM based netbook I'll stick with my Brazos E-350 thanks, and its great for embedded and industrial where hardening and lack of fans is a boon, and for certain niches I'm sure it'll be great for some server jobs, but to act like ARM is suddenly gonna come along and cause folks to throw out decades worth of X86 code and fall to their knees weeping in wonder is just delusional.
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Not quite. ARM sells cores (for the most part) and OEMs integrate them into their custom chip. It is this customization that makes each chip so different. Had there been a single chip supplier, there wouldn't be this proliferation of "hacks" needed to boot, configure and use the chips.