

AMD Announces the Availability of 64-bit ARM Opteron Developer Kits - timthorn
http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/64-bit-developer-kit-2014jul30.aspx

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lsc
I am... excited. Sadly, three grand is a lot of money for prgmr.com right now,
so I'll have to consider carefully if I want to wait for production or if I
want to buy a dev kit and start experimenting ahead of time, but ARM servers
are something we have been talking about selling for a while.

Even if their performance per watt turns out to be not as great as expected,
there is a fair bit of interest in the architecture, as far as I can tell.

These things look beefy enough that I might even be able to virtualize and
sell Xen VMs. There is some dev work involved with that, but srn has expressed
interest, so maybe .

~~~
dragontamer
You run prgmr.com ?? Nice.

Why Xen VMs? Isn't the Xen technology basically unproven in ARM space? I'd
imagine that KVM/ARM would be the best bet.

~~~
lsc
I'm pretty sure Xen on ARM has been a thing longer than KVM on ARM.

But in general, why Xen over KVM? the primary reason is that I understand xen
better.

I have a secondary reason, and it's a long-term bet against KVM.

KVM has a lot of features that while they are interesting in the corporate
space, make oversubscription too easy in the hosting space. Set up a KVM host
with a bunch of ram and a bunch of swap, and start handing out "memory" to
your kvm guests? By default it will get ram or swap as availability and usage
dictate, just like any other process.

To be absolutely clear, as far as I can tell, none of the current KVM VPS
providers are using these over-subscription methods right now. I'm not
accusing anyone of anything.

However, the primary reason why Xen beat OpenVZ and the other containerization
systems was that it is really quite difficult to oversubscribe ram on a Xen
host, and your pagecache was in your ram. It was not shared with others.

Sure, if the manager of an OpenVZ host allocates resources responsibly, it can
be more efficient than Xen. And some hosts did that. But, because some hosts
did not do that, Xen developed a reputation. Buy a xen host, and you are
getting honest ram. Buy an OpenVZ host and you are relying on the reputation
of the host.

KVM, now, can be configured to run in the same way Xen is, with no sharing of
memory, pagecache or otherwise.

However, it is simple to give KVM guests memory that is ram /or/ swap, and
other than performance, it would be impossible to tell, from the guest, what I
gave you.

Now, of course, right now KVM enjoys the same reputation as Xen, because all
the current KVM providers seem to be doing the responsible thing and only
handing out ram, not ram/swap mix, but at some point? someone is going to
change that.

The irritating thing is that the xen developers seem to be running as hard as
they can to put in kvm-stlye features to share more memory. Isolation, when
you are in a multi-tenant environment, is often more important than overall
efficiency.

------
penglish1
Finally, an ARM platform with ECC support. Well, and reasonable performance
networking one presumes. And PCI-Express!

I think ARM has a lot of potential in the "smartphone priced" server market,
particularly in an age where physical isolation (vs VMs or containers) and
legal ownership of the server might theoretically provide some advantages
against state surveillance. At least post-facto in the sense of "one could
conceivably build a lawsuit on this" vs. "now I need
DigitalOcean/Amazon/Google to sue the govt for me."

~~~
stephencanon
Unless I’m severely misremembering, Cortex-A8 had ECC support, and appeared ~6
years ago.

~~~
penglish1
That may be correct, but I chose the word "platform" very carefully. Most ARM
platforms to date, whether dev kits or final product have been aimed at
smartphones, tablets, consumer devices (wireless routes, NAS etc) or fully
embedded systems (SD cards?, hard disk controllers, etc). Apparently in those
applications, nobody cares enough about ECC to bother.

Well, that and the fact that the memory is soldered on in most cases and the
total device cost extremely low (compared to servers). So you are expected to
simply replace your system entirely in the event that there are memory errors
you notice. And hopefully nothing goes wrong that you don't notice.

Also, I suppose technically if you were only worried about bit flips due to
solar activity, then a tiny amount of RAM on a tiny chip has less surface area
and fewer bits TO flip than your standard full sized DIMM.

~~~
awalton
ECC doesn't typically yield that much of an advantage in the nominal case
until you get into very large amounts of memory - it's just a more expensive
part. I think it was calculated that cosmic rays are likely to cause single
bit errors in systems of 8GB of memory only once a decade, and most embedded
ARM situations (also carefully avoiding the "p" word) have far less than 8GB
of memory. So if single-bit errors are causing your embedded device to crash,
it's okay, it'll just roll over and restart... once every 50 years...

~~~
dman
How about in a datacenter with 1000 processors and 64 gigs of ram per
processor?

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mark3mark
Is this fedora devkit the same as what Red Hat just announced as "ARM Partner
Early Access Program for Partner Ecosystem"?

[http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-
ha...](http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-hat-launches-
arm-partner-early-access-program-for-partner-ecosystem)

~~~
rwmj
No. The Red Hat announcement is a variant of RHEL. However you can just run
Fedora 21 on ARM64 -- I'm running it on my dev machine (which is not AMD, but
X-Gene based).

    
    
        Linux arm64.home.annexia.org 3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj4.fc22.aarch64 #1 SMP Mon Jul 28 13:50:24 BST 2014 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

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twotwotwo
It's a footnote to the larger thing, but it mentions "compression and crypto
co-processors". I'm familiar with hardware crypto acceleration, but I'm sort
of curious about the compression part--is it gzip or one of the fast algos
like Snappy/LZO/LZ4 or something proprietary? How fast?

Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting
for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with
(perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.

~~~
dragontamer
I doubt that it can keep up with the Intel AES-instructions on a Xeon.

Maybe for like... $1000... AMD would have a solid offering. But $3000 for
this? Really?

~~~
bio4m
Its a dev board; not really something you'd use in production. Its a small run
of reference hardware for devs to get started on; by the time its ready for
release OEM's will have much more affordable kit for end users to buy.

~~~
dragontamer
It'd be nice to have an idea of how affordable it would get. For now, the
$3000 dev kit is the only solid price we can work with...

~~~
wmf
For the motherboard+processor I would predict at most $200 for the quad core
and $350 for the 8-core version.

~~~
dragontamer
If you're talking motherboard + processor... They'd have to do better than
that to beat Intel Atom.

[http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-
MB46...](http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-
MB4696/Supermicro_A1SAM-2750F_uATX_Intel_Atom_C2750_20W_8-core_System-on-
Chip?gclid=CJ-8toDm7b8CFcZQ7AodaywAdw)

Oct-core Atom, Integrated IPMI, 4xGBe ports for $360. And since it is an x86
platform, you don't have any software migration issues.

~~~
wmf
That's my point of comparison. Best case, if Seattle can be slightly faster
than Avoton with better I/O and the customers get high on ARM hype, AMD could
charge at most the same price as Avoton. Most likely it will be cheaper.

------
SoapSeller
It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so
they have to produce processors based on ARM designs.

I'm really hoping that someone will compete with Intel on the high-end CPUs,
maybe IBM's PowerPC?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Interesting, except this is "head to head" with AMD. It is part of the reason
Intel has been making massive investments across their portfolio to fend off
ARM incursions.

AMD showed with the original AMD64 architecture that they could "out compete"
Intel, it was fascinating at the time to see Enterprise level folks having to
choose AMD over Intel because Intel was insisting that if you wanted 64 bits
you went with Itanium. But it also showed how futile it is to try to compete
with them using an ISA and eco-system where they have all the advantages. Chip
sets and front side busses and a million other ways that Intel keeps a lock on
their bread and butter.

ARM from AMD, means that to compete with them Intel either has to cut margins
on their server chips to ARM levels, or make x86-64 server chips competitive.
For a lot of places CPUs per cubic foot of rack space is an important number
as the cost per month of a rack in a Colo (can be) fixed, the more stuff you
can run in it while running at 80% power the lower your monthly cost per
instance, and higher profit per instance. Getting a penny per core extra per
hour per day can be a huge difference.

So this is an opening salvo in the next battle. I am predicting it will be
just as interesting as the time AMD showed the world you could do 64 bits in a
'commodity' processor.

~~~
wsxcde
> _eco-system where they have all the advantages_

Maybe this is what you're alluding to, but Intel used a whole host of anti-
competitive practices to prevent AMD from gaining a foothold in the market at
a time when AMD had faster and better CPUs. And this was part of the reason
why AMD ended up buying ATI (IIRC they were after NVIDIA for a while) - they
wanted another angle from which to attack Intel.

But it seems like they overpaid for ATI, and then Barcelona happened and
Bulldozer was delayed beyond belief and so the last few years have been very
tough for AMD. Let's hope this gets them back into the game.

~~~
yuhong
Not to mention more importantly they did it at just the wrong time.

------
rdl
Seems like a bad idea to price your dev kit this high. If I were in AMD's
position, I'd heavily subsidize the dev kits -- maybe $500-1000 -- to try to
get people to build on my platform.

At $3k, it's only going to be appealing to hardware OEMs or big teams. At
$500, random people within companies would buy them (i.e. me), or people might
get them for personal projects.

The idea of something with working TrustZones (vs. the abortion which is
TCG/TPM) is intriguing, on top of ARM power savings.

~~~
mcpherrinm
You don't want a devkit like this to be popular.

These surely aren't ramped up on a full production line, more likely being
made in prototype houses that can't handle the volume, and have extensive
testing of each unit.

You need to get the OEMs and big teams on board first, and can get the
developer-centric experimental products out later.

------
api
Naming it Opteron is horribly confusing... is it x86 or ARM?

~~~
dragontamer
Opteron A-series is ARM. The pure numbers (ie: Opteron 4360) are x86.

Also, expect more AMD marketing gaffs. They fired a good chunk of their
marketing team a year ago when they were downsizing.

AMD got good stuff coming IMO, but they are billions of $$ in debt and have
been operating at a loss for a few years.

~~~
phkahler
>>Opteron A-series is ARM.

That's pretty stupid considering all A-series APUs they've been selling for a
few years now.

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carlsborg
"The whole thing has an expected power usage of 25W." \- from an Ars article
from Jan this year.

On the desktop front, the recent Kaveri A10s (low cost quad core CPUs with
built-in Radeon R7 graphics) coupled with 2.4Ghz memory gives very playable
frame rates for almost all the big releases.

------
tormeh
Why Fedora?

~~~
sliverstorm
As opposed to...?

ARM Opteron development kits are targeted at server- notice the Opteron
moniker- which means RedHat is a natural partner, and Fedora is RedHat's
testing OS.

(Why not an old stable OS? Because ARM64 is brand-new)

~~~
tormeh
I was thinking Red Hat, but I suppose that's not out yet for ARM64.

~~~
Alupis
Red Hat tests new things in Fedora before they move into RHEL/CentOS. This
makes Fedora a fantastic development platform as well as a "preview" of what
may be coming in the future RHEL/CentOS releases.

------
dragontamer
$3000 for a single server?

Erm... a good Xeon Dell with Dual 10GBe extension is $2000... and the Xeon can
scale up basically indefinitely.

Don't believe me? Go configure a Dell R220 Poweredge with Dual-10GBe ports.
Its only $2,021.37.

Hopefully, the real hardware will be significantly cheaper. AMD has an issue
competing against itself (ie: Opteron 4360), let alone against Intel if these
are the prices they're looking for.

~~~
dman
This is a development kit.

