

Nvidia Project Denver: ARM Powered Servers  - yarapavan
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/01/16/NVIDIAProjectDenverARMPoweredServers.aspx

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jfb
I predict that this is primarily going into a Cell like architecture --
(relatively) pissweak main MPU surrounded by a bucketload of kickass
specialized processors (in Toshiba/Sony's case, beefy vector units, in Denver,
super high end nVidia GPU cores) on a v. fast memory bus. The presence of
Windows for ARM is interesting, too -- I wonder if we're looking at the
beginnings of XOBX 720 here.

~~~
kjksf
Doubtful. Specialized graphics processor combined with a weak CPU makes sense
in a console where graphics generation and display is core task.

In a server context, GPUs don't make sense. They won't make your web server or
a database or Ruby any faster. In fact, in a server a GPU could be stripped
off completely to save cost and power without impacting the performance.

Programming a GPU or other specialized processors requires custom code. You
can't just recompile your database written in C or Java to magically take
advantage of them. And since people can't afford to rewrite the whole software
stack to take advantage of such capabilities just to serve web pages, it's not
going to happen.

As the article says, the main reasons those chips might get traction is low
power (and possibly low cost) since the cost of power is very important at
scale and ARM is better at power management than Intel.

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wmf
That's a key issue; strong GPU + weak CPU is great for just about every market
_other than_ general-purpose servers. So is it worth it for Nvidia to build a
separate ARM-only chip just for the general-purpose server market? (especially
considering that Marvell and Calxeda are already targeting that market)

~~~
jfb
I don't think Denver is going to end up in many general purpose servers
regardless of what the press release might say.

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Keyframe
What happened to SeaMicro? <http://www.seamicro.com/> I remember there was a
boom with their PR and then silence.

~~~
wmf
One might speculate that they're working on an Armada XP-powered version.

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ot
I wonder if "managed" cloud hosting services like Heroku (Ruby),
Azure/AppHarbor (.NET) and AppEngine (Python/Java) could deploy ARM-based data
centers to save power, since their platforms are basically processor-agnostic.

~~~
pat2man
Even processor agnostic programs will run poorly on a GPU. GPUs are about
doing very basic tasks very quickly. CPUs can do more but are slower. Most
computer programs take advantage of the extra features in a GPU and would not
be able to run on a GPU.

~~~
ot
What do you mean? ARM is not a GPU.

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checoivan
If this doesn't work out at least some Atom servers would be nice as well.

It would be great for datacenters that need to save cost on energy and are IO
bound, like those saving email/messaging with an already underused cpu anyway.
I wonder what the maximum memory would be for these new servers.

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juhygtfghjk
Even if MSFT ever sell an ARM port of Windows Server and if you are running
big server tasks (Oracle, SQLServer, IIS)etc then you will still need Intel
for the horsepower.

If the servers are just low power, high efficiency file servers then every NAS
already uses an ARM core to run Samba

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jws
Assuming the ARM servers can beat Intel in "work per joule", which I think
they will, then they can win in what is now the VPS space.

I use virtual private servers from three different vendors for a number of
projects, and they make a lot of sense from the cost standpoint, but they have
a huge drawback that you are sharing resources with others and their workloads
impact your abilities (plus any one of them could be a vector to introduce a
hypervisor exploit and compromise the system). I'd much rather have a small
computer to myself.

Imagine a 1U system[1] with 32 independent 1GHz ARM servers[2]. That hits
about the same power use as a modern intel machine, has an amazing memory
bandwidth by comparison, and if you rent them out for ~$8/month each (smallest
slices available now) it is a money farm.

Systems like this will also work for problems that scale laterally. Pushing
that a bit, imagine if a CDN vendor started putting racks of these at their
strategic locations, you could improve your application's response time by
hosting nearby, handling locally what you can, and bundling the heavy lifting
back to your big servers in an efficient way.

[1] Or 2U if space isn't at a premium. They are easier to cool. [2] Disks go
elsewhere, say across a 1gbps ethernet switch to a SAN. Build in the switches
and you don't need the magnetics for the ethernet, there are clever capacitive
solutions.

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patrickgzill
Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core
Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of
RAM.

~~~
lsc
ayup. I've looked into renting out small ARM servers rather than VPSs, and the
biggest thing stopping me is that the ram is not socketed, and all the boards
I can get are made for client boxes (e.g. not enough ram, and too much video
hardware driving up the cost.) I mean, in the hosting industry, we expect to
pay off our hardware in something like four months, and unless you are a lot
better at marketing than I am, it's difficult to charge a whole lot more than
$20 per gigabyte of ram per month, so the total cost for the unit (including
cpu and disk) has to be around $80 for every gigabyte of ram or so. right now,
the panda board looks like the best choice, and even before disk you are
looking at almost $200 for something with a power supply, etc..

Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what
have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)

If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved.
(Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet
there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without
ECC.)

But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that
concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a
particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource
contention problems that come with virtualization.

