

Baidu rolls out world's first commercial deployment of Marvell ARM server - Ecio78
http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=3576

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sturadnidge
This article on El Reg gives a better overview I think, including mention of
the 40-bit memory addressing on the Armada XP that has been commented on in
here already.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/20/baidu_marvell_arm_se...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/20/baidu_marvell_arm_servers/)

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christkv
Interestingly I noted that it supports 16GB DDR3 RAM. Since all current ARM
cores are 32bit I wonder if they are doing some sort of bank switching to
address all the RAM.

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kale
I'm a little outside of my area of expertise, but didn't Intel late model
32-bit chips have a form of larger memory addressing? I thought I read
somewhere that there was a greater-than-32-bit memory address setup in x86
architectures, but Microsoft products wouldn't take advantage of it, only
Linux and other OSs were able to use it.

Even in a modern x86-64 bit architechture, you can do some limited 128 and 256
bit operations. This ARM may have a greater-than 32 bit memory addressing
setup, but only support 32 bit opcodes for the main registers.

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theatrus2
You're thinking of PAE. It allowed the system as a whole to use more than
4Gib, but it still limited a virtual memory space to 4GiB.

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EwanToo
There's a couple of patently untrue statements inside the press release, like
"As the first organization in the world to leverage ARM servers for commercial
use...", but the move is another sign of the growth of ARM servers.

To me, the real piece of information is near the bottom, "ower the total cost
of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server
solutions", this is where Intel's challenge really is.

It's not about performance, or even about Watts consumed, it's about the money
spent to operate a service, from the very bottom of the stack where
electricity is consumed, through the management of the application layer.

Server hardware is going to cost a lot less in the next couple of years, and
Intel are going to have to work out how they can make money in this new
environment, whether that's through going all out on low end kit, or moving up
the management layer.

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andrewf
Is there a way for me to get access to a machine like this if I want to see
how well my code runs? If I want to benchmark some code on a crazy i7, I can
just fire up an instance on EC2 for a couple of hours.

I'm not aware of anything like that for the newer ARM processors. There's an
Ubuntu ARM AMI which lets you ssh straight into an ARM image.. running on QEMU
on top of EC2. Not ideal.

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josteink
Intel: Be afraid, be very afraid.

