Open Compute 'Group Hug' Board Allows Swappable CPUs In Servers

Nerval's Lobster writes "AMD, Intel, ARM: for years, their respective CPU architectures required separate sockets, separate motherboards, and in effect, separate servers. But no longer: Facebook and the Open Compute Summit have announced a common daughtercard specification that can link virtually any processor to the motherboard. AMD, Applied Micro, Intel, and Calxeda have already embraced the new board, dubbed 'Group Hug.' Hardware designs based on the technology will reportedly appear at the show. The Group Hug card will be connected via a simple x8 PCI Express connector to the main motherboard. But Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, also told an audience at the Summit that, while a standard has been provided, it may be some time before the real-world appearance of servers built on the technology."

Comments

Not sure this will help an ARM system much

[Marcion]

I can understand an organisation on the scale of Facebook wanting the ability to take advantage of bargains to buy processors in bulk and swap them out. I am not sure how widely applicable this is though.

The cool thing about ARM is the lack of complexity and therefore a potentially cheaper cost and greater energy efficiency. The daughter board seems to go against that by adding complexity, if you swap out an ARM chip, which might be passively cooled or have low powered fan, with some high end Intel server chip, you will also need to change the cooling and PSU.

Re:huh?

[Bengie]

It could be like what Seamicro does and use PCIe and a kind of "network switch", minus 10Gb NICs, cables, an actual switch, etc. Everything a bunch of nodes needs minus a lot of overhead.

A bunch of daughter-boards that plug into a PCIe motherboard is a great idea.