The State of ARM RISC in the DataCenter
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@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Banana Pro + Samsung EVO SSD + USB SD card reader + a few rubber bands = pretty cool armhf image prepping machine
For anyone else who's wondering wtf fruit is doing in an electronics project
Raspberry's, Banana's... will order some Orange's soon, too
And a HiKey for sure. I expect them to deliver a huge performance boost in every possible way.
Another interesting product is the 96boards EE HuskyBoard: 4x SATA, PCI-E and DDR3 SO-DIMM
SOC: AMD Opteron A1100 Series
damn that's no joke
AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC specifications:
Up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 4MB shared Level 2 and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache
2x 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 channels supporting up to 1866 MHz with ECC
2x 10Gb Ethernet network connectivity
8-lane PCI-Express
Gen 3
14 SATA-3 portsJupp. Little monster.
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The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
How close is that to being able to buy a micro-atx board chip and ram though...
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
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@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
How close is that to being able to buy a micro-atx board chip and ram though...
Very close: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/amd-opteron-a1100-enterprise-production,1-3107.html
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@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
Yeah, but that's an Intel system. The whole point about the ARM architecture in servers is Flops per Watt. They aren't as fast as Intel systems, but they are much more efficient.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
Yeah, but that's an Intel system. The whole point about the ARM architecture in servers is Flops per Watt. They aren't as fast as Intel systems, but they are much more efficient.
Lets hope the pricing trend heads lower once significant production ramps up
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@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
Yeah, but that's an Intel system. The whole point about the ARM architecture in servers is Flops per Watt. They aren't as fast as Intel systems, but they are much more efficient.
Lets hope the pricing trend heads lower once significant production ramps up
Well, just from looking at the price of the dev board, which is considerable low, I would say we will see some interesting ARM based server boards in the future.
Also Linux and BSD both don't care much about the underlying architecture, which means that a proven OS is already available.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
Yeah, but that's an Intel system. The whole point about the ARM architecture in servers is Flops per Watt. They aren't as fast as Intel systems, but they are much more efficient.
Lets hope the pricing trend heads lower once significant production ramps up
Well, just from looking at the price of the dev board, which is considerable low, I would say we will see some interesting ARM based server boards in the future.
Also Linux and BSD both don't care much about the underlying architecture, which means that a proven OS is already available.
Sure, I get that. But when Dell/HP puts their spin on it, it will probably be nearly the same cost as typical servers. I'm guessing we'll only see a few hundred dollars cost difference on average.
Like others things, in this case the CPU probably isn't where most of the costs come from.
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
The LeMaker Cello is a similar A1100 based board, available for 299 USD. Would be a perfect test / dev rig.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/kWZyxY
Celeron, 4gb ram, 60gb ssd, case, psu... $311CDN
Yeah, but that's an Intel system. The whole point about the ARM architecture in servers is Flops per Watt. They aren't as fast as Intel systems, but they are much more efficient.
Lets hope the pricing trend heads lower once significant production ramps up
Well, just from looking at the price of the dev board, which is considerable low, I would say we will see some interesting ARM based server boards in the future.
Also Linux and BSD both don't care much about the underlying architecture, which means that a proven OS is already available.
Sure, I get that. But when Dell/HP puts their spin on it, it will probably be nearly the same cost as typical servers. I'm guessing we'll only see a few hundred dollars cost difference on average.
Like others things, in this case the CPU probably isn't where most of the costs come from.
Think of larger scales. While a single A11xx probably can't beat a modern Xeon in anything but CPU power/watt, a whole bunch of them can. They could be pretty perfect webservers, in-memory database nodes, maybe even virtualization hosts for ARM based VMs at some point in time.
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Sure, I see when we don't have typical 2-4 socket computers, instead a server might have 20+ sockets.
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@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Sure, I see when we don't have typical 2-4 socket computers, instead a server might have 20+ sockets.
Actually the move will be to single sockets, at least at first. ARMs rarely support multiple sockets.
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@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
SBCs are the expectation for racks of ARM servers, like MoonShot.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Sure, I see when we don't have typical 2-4 socket computers, instead a server might have 20+ sockets.
Actually the move will be to single sockets, at least at first. ARMs rarely support multiple sockets.
So how do you see these appearing in the DC? Single socket, I'm guessing you're not virtualizing.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
SBCs are the expectation for racks of ARM servers, like MoonShot.
This makes great sense when looking at DevOps, but I don't understand how they would work in a typical virtualized setup - but maybe that's not who they are going up against?
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Sure, I see when we don't have typical 2-4 socket computers, instead a server might have 20+ sockets.
Actually the move will be to single sockets, at least at first. ARMs rarely support multiple sockets.
So how do you see these appearing in the DC? Single socket, I'm guessing you're not virtualizing.
Why? It can go both ways, but Xen and containers are the standards that are expected. Why would single socket not have you virtualizing?
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
SBCs are the expectation for racks of ARM servers, like MoonShot.
This makes great sense when looking at DevOps, but I don't understand how they would work in a typical virtualized setup - but maybe that's not who they are going up against?
DevOps and typical virtualization overlap. These are smaller individual units that you are used to, but why do you feel that this would significantly impact virtualization or deployment decisions outside of needing more nodes that are cheaper rather than fewer that are more expensive?
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
SBCs are the expectation for racks of ARM servers, like MoonShot.
This makes great sense when looking at DevOps, but I don't understand how they would work in a typical virtualized setup - but maybe that's not who they are going up against?
Don't forget that ARM SoCs can easily pack dozens of cores in a single package. For example: https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/01/details-emerge-chinas-64-core-arm-chip/
I would expect to see servers like the aforementioned MoonShot from HP: Lots of cores per SoC, but just one SoC per board. And dozens of boards per chassis.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr @Dashrender It will be interesting to see how it works out between consolidation (ARM server racks) and IoT/shards/stand-alone/single-board-computers
SBCs are the expectation for racks of ARM servers, like MoonShot.
This makes great sense when looking at DevOps, but I don't understand how they would work in a typical virtualized setup - but maybe that's not who they are going up against?
Don't forget that ARM SoCs can easily pack dozens of cores in a single package. For example: https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/01/details-emerge-chinas-64-core-arm-chip/
I would expect to see servers like the aforementioned MoonShot from HP: Lots of cores per SoC, but just one SoC per board. And dozens of boards per chassis.
Exactly. Blade approach, but very dense. So maybe 16 servers in a chassis. Each server might be 64 cores. So a 3U user might be really dense in cores.
