Benchmark/Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCodnn0HOyI
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/cavium-thunder-x2-3-months-later-freebsd-opensuse-redhat
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/cavium-thunder-x2-3-months-later-freebsd-opensuse-redhat
3 Likes
Super interesting. Im still not up to speed on the cost / performance because it’s rack gear. Pricing is not a simple look up.
I can see arm is on every phone and Apple has put the finger up at Intel and makes its own custom arm chips for iDevices.
It is going to be a thing I truly believe just because low power is what servers need and phones need and ARM is all over phones currently.
The whole I want x64 because my desktop is x64. Does not pass my litmus test. What a do on my desktop is nothing like a server workload for a task.
I can see VPS’s where you run your code in the cloud sure. But everyone in cloud business wants to claw back control to themselves and provide you their maintenance free hands off version of a server workload task. And that could run on anything.
Am really stoked about this type of server. Considering the direction development has been going, and how the general infrastructure is for remote services, it’s the only way to go. The x64 architecture is good, I have no issues with it, I just don’t see x64 being the cornerstone for the future, we need to build our software to be vastly more parallel than what we’re doing today-
We’re reaching the limit of what we can squeeze out of x64 architecture, not to mention all the old instruction sets cluttering up processors these days. Not only have we designed ourselves into a dead end when it comes to processor architecture, we’re also designing ourselves into a software dead end. We have to get away from the thought of doing one thing super fast, and instead divide this one large task into many smaller tasks, which can be done i parallel of a much larger scale.
Consider the direction development has moved, with Kubernetes and containers especially. Small, highly specialized objects that does a single task fast and stable, rarely, this single task is the answer to the full scope of the job, therefore a series of small tasks are started, which will fulfill the job in parallel. I see the currently accepted architecture with x64, in some form as monolithic architecture, whereas ARM opens up more posibilites for micro services and conceeptually similar operations.
When it comes to workstations, a large part of the workloads of today could easily be run on arm systems, I for one would chose a 16 core system @2GHz over 8 core @4GHz any day.
Can only agree with you Wendell, these are interesting times, and it will be very interesting to see how it all looks at the end of 2019, let’s just hope there are some administrators out there, that are able to sell this to the paper pushers, so we can move onward, and look at the possibilities for the future of computing.