
Is Facebook Planning a Move to ARM Based Servers? - josephscott
https://josephscott.org/archives/2013/12/is-facebook-planning-a-move-to-arm-based-servers/
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salient
So is Google:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-
mull...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull-
designing-chips-in-threat-to-intel.html)

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justincormack
The proposed applications (network control plane) don't correspond to what you
would write in PHP (the main Facebook app).

The arm64 stuff on the other hand is looming like being the first new RISC
architecture since er alpha and there may well be a move towards using it.
There was a story recently that Google has an ARM license too.

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kintamanimatt
Why ARM? What are the benefits of ARM compared to other architectures? Are
there drawbacks to the architecture?

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salient
For the same reason Apple is making its own custom ARM CPU right now - it can
be highly integrated with whatever they want it to be, and it has exactly what
_they_ need, and none of the stuff they don't need. You can build solutions
that are much more custom with ARM.

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gaius
Well that's not a property of ARM the CPU but ARM the business model (IP
licensing). And ARM aren't the only player in this space, there is also MIPS
(and others).

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salient
ARM has the momentum, compared to MIPS.

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stusmall
While ARM has a lot more momentum I wouldn't completely discount MIPS. They
are still out there and churning away in places you wouldn't expect. If I
remember correctly the PIC32 is nothing but a modified MIPS core.

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nate_meurer
In addition, China has staked its domestic chip design efforts on MIPS64:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson)

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Myrmornis
Incidentally, I think the following sentence from the Wikipedia introduction
is misleading / untrue.

    
    
      China uses GNU/Linux with its Loongson processor family
      to achieve technology independence.
    

It reads to me like a statement that Linux is widely used throughout China,
whereas my understanding is that use of non-Microsoft OSs is basically
negligible in China[1]. Perhaps someone who knows more than me about this area
would like to remove it.

[1] [http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-CN-
monthly-201211-201311](http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-CN-monthly-201211-201311)

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tdmackey
They've been hiring for this for a while now,
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=engineering...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=engineering&req=a0IA0000006cPTMMA2)

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cordite
Didn't HP consider making blade like units with up to 20 servers per unit? I
saw that they canceled that due to some deal with Intel.

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twotwotwo
Maybe for things like photo storage, where CPU speed isn't that important.
Baidu is already using ARM servers for cloud storage.

