

Dell skunkworks brews ARM server future - robin_reala
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/02/dell_dcs_arm_risc_server/

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lsc
This /maybe/ makes sense if you are CPU bound. Uh, for everything else, I
don't really see it competing with virtualized X86. One of my 8 core, 32GiB
ram socket G34 opterons? comes in well under 200 watts, including disk and
power supply inefficiencies. are those beagle boards under 3.3 watts?

also, my capital costs are lower. one 32GiB reg. ecc ram, 8 2.0ghz core and 4
500gb disk server comes out to around $2500 in parts, give or take. That's a
lot less than 60 of those beagle boards.

Of course, it's quite possible that 60 arm cores are better than 8 opteron
cores, even though it's close to equal on ram.

I will revisit this issue when the many-core ARM chips start shipping, and
when arm boards start coming with socketed ram.

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rbanffy
Actually, it makes a lot of sense if you are IO bound too. Having little
efficient ARM cores keeping your disk and/or network channels supplied is
better than doing the same with a 90% idling x86.

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lsc
(ecc) ram cache is astoundingly important to have I/O at bearable speeds, and
the beagle boards max out at 512MiB ram, about what I expect my next cellphone
to have. Again, we are in a situation where the ARM boards will become
radically more useful when they come with socketed ram modules.

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rbanffy
Nobody is seriously considering those boards for servers, but server boards
built around ARM cores. The only question is the peripheral logic around those
cores.

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8ren
The power consumption argument was also applied to SSDs partly replacing HDDs
in the server - anyone know how adoption of that is progressing?

Article mentions ARMs in netbooks - but where are they? It seems that MS
discounting Windows for netbooks successfully staved off linux - and therefore
ARM.

ARM's openness makes the world their research lab. The only way to compete
with Intel's massive R&D budget.

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rbanffy
> It seems that MS discounting Windows for netbooks successfully staved off
> linux - and therefore ARM.

Shouldn't we be thankful for how they help advance the progress of technology?

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rbanffy
Just curious: how hard would it be to turn GPU cores into simple ARM cores? I
understand they are very different animals, but if it were possible to cram an
ARM into the space and signaling a GPU core uses, AMD could show a massively
multi-core ARM chip in little time.

What would it run? I am not sure, but there are lots of IO-heavy workloads
where I work.

Don't think servers - think really clever routers.

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protomyth
Is there a standard DC power plug for servers? It would seem that would help
with overall power / heat if the AC/DC conversion could be external and
feeding multiple low power servers.

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robgough
Wasn't there talk about Facebook switching to ARM servers at one point? What
happened to that?

