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Gelsinger Shoots Down EMC On ARM

Posted by timothy on from the context-switching-is-costly dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "EMC president and incoming VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger most likely shot down any hope that the company's storage arrays would be built around the ARM architecture. Gelsinger, who also helped orchestrate the VMworld show in San Francisco this week, presented an Aug. 29 keynote at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, Calif. Afterward, an audience member told Gelsinger that as many as 25 percent of all servers could be shipped around the low-power ARM architecture, then asked if Gelsinger agreed with that estimate. EMC previously shifted its product lines to Intel processors. Gelsinger told the audience member that the situation is unlikely to change, even if ARM could deliver workloads at a fraction of the power of an X86 chip."

20 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. duh by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    EMC arrays are already pushing more than what four westmere cores can do and they don't even have some of the cool features that the new breed of all flash arrays are doing (global dedupe and inline block compression). It will be a LONG time before ARM can handle todays storage workloads, let alone all the cool stuff they should be adding.

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    1. Re:duh by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed - I read the summary and article more along the lines of "Company makes internal product design choice, ARM fan disappointed."

      Why is it news worthy what processor EMC choose? Are we missing something here? Did someone accidentally delete the paragraph which offered up something juicy, like "Gelsinger went on to shout the virtues of Intel, while his own personal Intel sales representative gave him a blow job and stuffed hundred dollar bills into his pants" ?

      Whoopdi-fucking-do that 25% of all servers could be based around ARM - does that immediately mean everyone that isn't using ARM should flock to it? Or does it mean that companies should continue to go on making internal decisions about their own products?

    2. Re:duh by Necroman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.

      One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.

      Also, running on low-power chips is easier if they have a secondary chip to do RAID 5 and 6 calculations for them (or if it's built into the main CPU as an add-on module. Intel actually does this now with some of their Xeon chips).

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    3. Re:duh by afidel · · Score: 2

      No, the low end NetApp uses an Intel processor and until recently it was the reason that nobody with any sanity would use their entry level array (the 2020/2050). There were all sorts of OS features you couldn't use because the mobile celeron in those boxes would bog down to the point of the storage becoming unavailable if they were turned on.

      If there's one box in my infrastructure I don't want to be underpowered it's the storage controller because a performance problem there affects every other system attached to it.

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    4. Re:duh by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.

      One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.

      I could swear the NAS appliance sitting on my desk at home had the EMC logo on it. And I know it has an ARM processor in it, specifically a Marvell XScale chip. It runs a modified version of Linux, but it's an EMC box (and even has some approved for VMWare thing on it).

      So yes, EMC has gone ARM on the low end, specifically the stuff they market under their consumer brand as Iomega ("An EMC company").

      Plenty fast for the home user, probalby sufficient for a mom and pop company, but will be woefully insufficient for anything larger. But nothing wrong - ARM makes it cheap and decently performing.

    5. Re:duh by jkflying · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's worse than that when you need something that uses lots of cache, like Java. I'm getting ~100x better performance on my i5 laptop than my Pi when doing Java FPU benchmarks, and this is with the Raspbian (hardware FPU) release.

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    6. Re:duh by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Here is what I don't get about these ARM fanbois...why is it that one product has to "win" and the other "lose". Its like what Jobs told the reporters when they kept trying to turn it into Apple VS MSFT "MSFT doesn't have to lose for Apple to win" and he was right, he was going after a different market.

      With ARM you are talking extremely low power, idles in the sub-mw range. That low a power draw has a cost and that's IPC. No way in hell the newest ARMs can put out even half the IPC of a 6 year old Phenom quad much less the new Intel cores. On the flipside X86 chips can't drop to the sub-mw idle usage unless you really strip down the core design like Brazos or Atom.

      Its different markets folks, its a scalpel and a chainsaw. This VS crap is just bullshit, different use cases require different levels of IPC, some x86 fits better, some ARM. That simple.

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    7. Re:duh by TopSpin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I was left to wonder who cared about what CPU EMC storage arrays use. Is there some EMC hacker culture with its own open source storage OS running on EMC devices? Where can I get one??

      Big storage needs lots of RAM. Intel has been providing 64 bit x86 CPUs, chipsets, memory controllers, etc. since 2004. I suppose EMC could license ARMv8 (the 64 bit extension of ARM that became available to licensees only about 12 months ago,) sign a contract with some foundry and design a system around 64 bit ARM. They certainly have the capital. If they did they would be the very first — there are no 64 bit ARMs being manufactured in volume anywhere yet.

      One can imagine ARM having some success in big storage. ARM cores can be extended with custom silicon to integrate important algorithms and they can achieve very high core density. Much of storage is embarrassingly parallel so peak performance of CPU cores isn't terribly important.

      Frankly I just don't think it matters much to big storage customers. They're paying for throughput, reliability, features and support, not an ISA. EMC could use 43 bit LISP processors soldered together by Taiwanese gnomes for all they care, as long as they can afford it and it performs.

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    8. Re:duh by Guspaz · · Score: 2

      Well, one thing that most people are bizarrely forgetting is that Pat Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009... He was one of the main architects/designers of the 486 (parts of his work still being in modern Intel chips), and he later went on to be Intel's CTO...

      Are people surprised that he would favour Intel chips after all that? I mean, seriously.

    9. Re:duh by Belial6 · · Score: 2

      Really? You really can't understand why nerds would want to know what kind of processor a major technology provider uses? You don't consider it newsworthy unless there is a scandal? I find this new very interesting. If one want to know about blow jobs, there are much better sites than Slashdot.

  2. In related news... by HockeyPuck · · Score: 4, Funny

    ARM fan is pissed off that IBM zSeries won't be using ARM processors either.

  3. Re:Ugh by PCM2 · · Score: 2

    Another day another thinly-vieled attempt at getting people to drive up page hits to the ghost towns of SlashBI/Cloud/etc. Just post the story here rather than trying redirect people to your buzzword sites.

    Not to mention that the "buzzword sites" are all advertising anyway. A lot of the posts on SlashBI are by Mike Vizard, who is currently a member of the "content strategy team" at King Fish Media, a company that has trademarked the phrase "own your own media channel." Basically, Slashdot has sold itself out as a propaganda channel for tech vendors, disguised as news.

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  4. Ya well by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    ARM fanboys are convinced that ARM is in every way superior to Intel and if only all the stupid companies/users out there would realize it then the world could switch and start the glorious ARM revolution.

    I've gotten pretty used to it on /. :P

  5. Re:Ugh by Jeng · · Score: 2

    At least it is not another fucking video, nor is it an ad laden blog that references another blog that references something that somewhat resembles the summary.

    Well, if it is ad laden, I don't see it.

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  6. Re:Ugh by Desler · · Score: 2

    The SlashBI/Cloud/Whatever sites are nothing but ads and slashvertisement articles. That's why the vast majority have zero comments.

  7. Pat Gelsinger, former CTO of Intel by charnov · · Score: 3, Informative

    In other news former CTO of Intel who has huge amounts of stock options says Intel chips are awesome! Seriously though, our tiny little SAN maxes out 8 Xeon cores and 16 GB of ram while running less than 30 heavy VMs (80,000 IOs on average). I don't see ARM in this space for a while.

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  8. The disk drives use more power than the CPU by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you have a rackmount case full of big disk drives front-ended by a CPU, the CPU isn't using a big fraction of the power. Nor does it constitute a large fraction of the cost. ARM is a 32-bit architecture. If you have a few terabytes in your disk array and 10Gb Ethernet going in and out. you might want more than 4GB of RAM in front of it.

    This sounds like some ARM fanboy thing.

    1. Re:The disk drives use more power than the CPU by CajunArson · · Score: 3, Informative

      Grandparent poster is right on 32 bits and anonymous coward is a stupid marketing drone. Arm recently released a specification for chips that will use 64 bit addressing... when they finally ship in 2015 or so, making them about 12 years late to the party* after the launch of the Athlon 64.

      * Yes I know that 64 bit was around much much longer than 2003, but I'm talking about the consumer space here.

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    2. Re:The disk drives use more power than the CPU by Desler · · Score: 2

      In your rush to one up them conveniently left off this part from the quote:

      As of March 2012, only the ARMv8-A ("application") profile has been defined, and no implementations have been announced.

      So there are no implementations of ARMv8 so his statement is effectively correct for any ARM chip or SoC you can currently purchase.

    3. Re:The disk drives use more power than the CPU by Quila · · Score: 2

      Agree with the point, but we're not talking about consumer space. In the embedded high-performance market like this, 64-bit was standard back in the 90s. The 64-bit DEC Alpha was common for Raster Image Processors and was in early NetApps. 64-bit MIPS found quite a lot of use in this area too.

      So ARM will be more like two decades late to the 64-bit party.