Arm Marches on!

Communities Blog
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With dominance of the mobile industry ARM and Intel are on a warpath as they seek to aggressively expand into each others markets. And ARM is aiming for the server market, the vice president of AMD is saying that by 2019 ARM will be 25% of the server chip market! The server market is changing, the focus is moving from extremely high-performance and expensive X86 processing to high-efficiency, low power, cheap and extremely scalable soloutions, such as the high performance GPU based super computers and emergent ARM clusters.

These smaller processors are cheaper, quicker to develop, for instance "An x86 (Intel-based) processor takes three years and $300 million to develop. Creating an ARM processor can take as little as three months and $30 million." and are moving much faster than X86. And with billions of ARM processors shipped annually compared to a few million X86 parts, and the fact that ARM is probably good enough for 2/3rds of consumers in the desktop world, X86 is starting to look like an endangered animal.

From SeaMicro super clusters to AMDs 28nm ARM857 supporting upto 128GB ECC DRAM, add-on opteron ARM boards and more. The EU is even funding a research program called Mont-Blac, to create a vastly more energy efficient blade based super-computer made out of your standard smart phone arm chips, and relying primarily on the GPU for computing power, this is part of PRACE which is an EU project which provides computing cycles to business and researchers. Each blade holds 15 compute cards, each compute card contains a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, 4 GB of DDR3-1600 DRAM, a microSD slot for local storage and a 1 GbE NIC. Nine blades fit into a chassis, and a rack holds six chassis, that gives a total of 810 processors, 6480 CPU cores and 810 GPUs. The big question to ask is the system designed in a way that they can simple design new cards with better arm processors and stick them in, meaning the blade servers could last a very long time, and the only thing you need to change is a little card, since everything is on the card! Same with GPU super-clusters!

Indeed ARM itself is doing some crazy things, such as Xgene with 8 2.4GHz CPUs and 4 10Gb ethernet on the chip which have been delayed but are expected to come out sometime this quarter, or the core link CCN 508 for server interconnect. It has been a long time coming, from smart-phones to netbooks and low-powered servers, they are doing extremely well and it will be very dificult for intel to claw back this market share that they are loosing.

 

Mont Blanc

Blade%20fully%20populated%20with%20SDB%201_0.JPG1024x620 77.5 KB

ARM857

Opteron ARM PCIE server board

http://www.montblanc-project.eu/media-corner/mediaCorner

http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/04/amd-micro-server-boss-welcomes-the-age-of-arm-based-servers-interview/

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/ARMs-Race-Company-Details-Attack-Plan-in-Server-Mobile-/

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I'm running a fully scaled ARM-based server. It works great. The cost doesn't lie in the hardware, basically a 15.000 EUR ARM-based system outperforms a 40.000 EUR x86 based server, and uses less power on top of that. The real cost lies in optimizing the applications. That cost however has to be set of to more than just the difference in hardware costs, it also has to be set of to the gain in security, as it's pretty doubtful that x86 hardware, especially from Intel, or even PPC hardware from IBM, is secure to use.

It's a win-win situation: less costs and more security because of open source designs. Downside is that it takes a lot of development to redo applications, and that is fucking expensive, even in open source, even with EU subsidies, and even with collaboration with Universities to aid development.

I've bought the ARM-based server in 2012. It's super cheap to upgrade and upscale. But in almost two years of development, still we haven't succeeded in bringing all the optimizations to the open source software that would make this technology useful for all enterprise applications that we implement on servers. This development cost is pretty much wasted investment, but luckily a lot of smaller companies and communities are working on it like crazy. It's getting there though, I can see a huge movement towards ARM in enterprise platforms starting at the end of this year.

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Yeah, at least one person read what I wrote lol :P.

The thing I like the most about these, is the idea that you can buy the server, then (in theory) you can just pop in new Graphics cards, arm boards, or those cartridges into the seamicro system. I know its probably not perfect for everything, but in theory, when we get to that point, it should save so much money! If I was intel, I would be very concerned!

I didnt really think of the security concerns, or how dificult it would be to move computing onto these platforms, since alot of this seems to be GPU based I would have thought people would just use OpenCL to do their computing, don't know how they will use the CPU parts.