
Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers - lesingerouge
https://www.hetzner.de/gb/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ax
======
scoopr
Well, its nice that ARM servers are coming available, even if they don't seem
quite that desirable as they are. Could be nice for ARM build CI server.

I wonder how the performance compares to say the scaleway[0] offerings, I
would guess the SD card storage doesn't compare favourably.

Given that there are 6eur/mo one core intel dedis[1][2] and 16eur/mo 8core
with 8gig ram and vastly more disk space[3], these seem a bit expensive.

[0] [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/](https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/) [1]
[http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml](http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml) [2]
[http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-
scg2](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-scg2) [3]
[http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-
xc](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc)

~~~
paulmd
Anything with SD card storage will perform very poorly. Anything that uses USB
2.0 as a system bus will perform like dogshit.

Using real SSDs on a real SATA channel makes an immense difference, not just
in performance but also in system stability. SD cards are meant to be linearly
loaded up with files, dumped to disk, then erased. They do not handle highly
random write loads with sectors of extreme write intensity very well, their
wear levelling is very minimal and sooner or later you will burn them out if
you're not careful. The typical way around this is using a write-protected SD
card for bootstrapping (if necessary). You load a minimal driver stub, and
then you either boot from a USB stick or you do a PXE boot from an image on
the network.

USB 2.0 is way too limited to handle your entire system disk+network
traffic+data disk load. You want USB 3.0 at a minimum if your computer is set
up like that.

If you just want something real minimal maybe the SD card options are OK, but
I highly, highly recommend a SSD-based system if you can swing it at all. If
you're not going to see a ton of traffic, maybe you could build it out once
and run it on your corporate network? That could be more appealing than a
hosted or colo'd solution, depending on the task.

~~~
pcwalton
ODROIDs come with eMMC storage, and they recommend using it over the SD card
for this reason. (I haven't tried it, since the workloads I'm using it with
tend to be CPU bound and SD cards are so much easier to find, so I don't know
how much of an improvement it is.)

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fierarul
What exactly is stopping ARM boards to have high IO?

Just allow people to use a normal 2.5" SSD or even m2 and you have a really
nice machine!

For example, the latest Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU which is faster
than my 1st machine (and maybe even my 2nd and 3rd) but is severly handicaped
by the IO speed which is limited to USB (plus, all the USB ports and Ethernet
using the same controller for extra slowness).

A quad-core ARM with a RAM slot supporting at least 8GB, a giga Ethernet port,
4 separate USB ports and a SATA connection would be glorious.

~~~
rwmj
For 32 bit ARM, it seems to be shortcuts in the SoC design a.k.a there's a
reason some boards cost under $50.

There exist some designs with real SATA (eg. Cubietruck) but those have poor
CPUs (A7), and there exist many designs with SATA-via-USB which is never going
to be fast. Also micro SD cards have abysmal performance for the sort of
random I/O that operating system root filesystems have.

Luckily the situation in 64 bit ARM server land is much better. The APM
Mustang and AMD designs have a combination of fast cores and properly
engineered I/O subsystems. Real SATA, multiple 10gigE and 1gigE interfaces,
PCIe, etc.

~~~
pm215
I would say it is not so much shortcuts as the fact that the 32-bit SoCs are
generally designed for mobile. The only way to get a cheap devboard is to use
an SoC which is being produced in high volume, so it doesn't have a
prohibitive cost. That means you get the peripherals that a mobile phone or
tablet wants, and not the ones that it doesn't, typically. If you insist on
using an SoC custom designed for a devboard then the board is probably going
to be tens of thousands of dollars.

64-bit is better because there are SoCs directly targeting server usecases
which therefore have the kind of peripherals you'd prefer to see in devboards.

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pavlov
The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those
are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a
server.

~~~
rwmj
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on
earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server
platform.

If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might
be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM
Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web
servers at scale than for VPS.

~~~
lazyjones
> _I 'm wondering who on earth is the market for this?_

People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU
usage, i.e. static pages and similar.

~~~
MichaelGG
>People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU
usage, i.e. static pages and similar.

Surely such cases are better served by offloading to a CDN. As much as I hate
centralizing to one company, CloudFlare nails this pretty damn well.

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ChuckMcM
This is a
[http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php](http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php)
ODroid XU4 if you are wondering, I have one of their ODroid C boards and find
it quite useful.

~~~
pcwalton
Seconding this. I use an ODROID XU3 (the earlier model) for testing Servo on
multicore ARM and it's surprisingly fast, especially if your workload
parallelizes. It's amazing how much CPU/GPU power you can get for $75, and
since it's both parallel, cheap, and based on a mainstream consumer SoC I
would love for it to be a harbinger of things to come :)

What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is
probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics
(the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).

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mahouse
Horrible price for the hardware. I mean, as a proof of concept it is OK, but
the power these deliver is laughable for the price they have.

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elcct
Too little RAM and too little I/O for the price if you compare to VPS servers.

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tinco
Everyone who says this is a bad price for the hardware, please link me to any
other bare metal server for rent at 16e/mo. I haven't seen it, not at Hetzner,
nor anywhere else.

You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.

~~~
pjc50
For what application is bare metal server rental particularly useful? (as
opposed to either own colo or low end VPS)

~~~
tinco
There's security, basically there's two vectors a Hetzner compromise can be
used against us, either they reboot a machine and get our data through rescue
mode, or they gain physical access. VPS'es can be hacked fully digitally and
transparently (i.e. if you have access to the hypervisor you're in).

There's performance concerns as well, but those don't really apply for ARM as
obviously you can do better.

