Calxeda's ARM server tested
by Johan De Gelas on March 12, 2013 7:14 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Arm
- Xeon
- Boston
- Calxeda
- server
- Enterprise CPUs
Pricing
So how much does this Boston Viridis server cost? $20,000 is the official price for one Boston Viridis with 24 nodes at 1.4GHz and 96GB of RAM. That is simply very expensive. A Dell R720 with dual 10 gigabit, 96GB of RAM and two Xeons E5-L2650L is in the $8000 range; you could easily buy two Dell R720 and double your performance. The higher power bill of the Xeon E5 servers is that case hardly an issue, unless you are very power constrained. However, these systems are targeted at larger deployments.
Buy a whole rack of them and the price comes down to $352 per server node, or about $8500 per server. We have some experience with medium quantity sales, and our best guess is that you get typically a 10 to 20% discount when you buy 20 of them. So that would mean that the Xeon E5 server would be around $6500-$7200 and the Boston Viridis around $8500. Considering that you get an integrated (5x 10Gbit) switch and a lower power bill with the Boston Viridis, the difference is not that large anymore.
Calxeda's Roadmap and Our Opinion
Let's be clear: most applications still run better on the Xeon E5. Our CPU benchmarks clearly indicate that any application that accesses the memory frequently or that needs high per thread integer processing power will run better on the Xeon E5. Compiling and installing software simply feels so much faster on the Xeon E5, there is no need to benchmark.
There's more: if your performance requirements are higher than what a quad-core Cortex-A9 can deliver, the Xeon E5 is a lot more flexible and a better choice in most cases. Scaling up is after all a lot easier than using load balancers and other complex software or hardware to scale out. Also, the management software of the Boston Viridis does the job, but Dell's DRAC, HP ILO, and Supermicro's IM are more user friendly.
Calxeda is aware of all this, as they label their first "highbank" server architecture with the ECX-1000 SoC as targeted to the "early adopter". That is why we deliberately tested a scenario that would be relevant to the potential early adopters: a cluster of web servers that is relatively network intensive as it serves a lot of media files. This is one of the better scenarios for Calxeda, but not the best: we could imagine that a streaming server or storage server would be an even better fit. Especially the latter catches on, and the storage version of the Boston Viridis sells well.
So on the one hand, no, the current Calxeda servers are no Intel Xeon killers (yet). However, we feel that the Calxeda's ECX-1000 server node is revolutionary technology. When we ran 16 VMs (instead of 24), the dual low power Xeon was capable of achieving the same performance per VM as the Calxeda server nodes. That this 24 node system could offer 50% more throughput at 10% lower power than one of the best Xeon machines available was honestly surprising to us. 8W at the wall per server node—exactly what Calxeda claimed—is nothing short of remarkable, because it means that the 48 server node machine, which is also available, is even more efficient.
To put that 8W number in perspective, the current Intel Atoms that offer similar performance need that kind of power for the SoC alone and are baked with Intel's superior 32nm process technology. The next generation ARM servers are already on the way and will probably hit the market in the third quarter of this year. The "Midway" SoC is based on a 28nm (TSMC) Cortex-A15 chip. A 28nm Cortex-A15 offers 50% higher single-threaded integer performance at slightly higher power levels and can address up to 16GB of RAM. With that it's safe to conclude that the next Calxeda server will be a good match for a much larger range of applications--memcached, larger web, and midrange database servers for examples. By then, virtualization will be available with KVM and Xen, but we think virtualization on ARM will only take off when the ARM A57 core with its 64-bit ARM V8 ISA hits the market in 2014.
Right now, the limited performance of the individual server nodes makes the Boston Viridis attractive for web applications with lower CPU demands in a power constrained data center. But the extremely low energy consumption and the rapidly increasing performance of the ARM cores show great potential for Calxeda's technology. Short term, this is a niche market, but in another year or two this style of approach could easily encroach on Intel's higher end markets.
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thenewguy617 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I would like to see the results with the website running on bare metal. I would like to, but I don't believe you when you say the virtualization overhead is minimal.Also, did you include the power used by the switch? as we scale the xeon cluster we will add a lot of cost and power in the network, however Calxeda fabric should scale for free.
thebeastie - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
I think a lot of you are missing the main point or future potential of this server technology. And that is that intel like to make an absolute minimum of $50 per CPU they make, in server CPUs it's more like $300.These Arm CPUs are being sold at around $10 a CPU.
Sure Caldexa have gone the hard yards making such a server and want a lot of money for it. BUT once these ARM servers are priced in relative context of their actual CPu costs its going to be the biggest bomb drop on Intels sever profits in history.
Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
Assuming you are right and ARM is becoming so important that it can't be ignored, what's to prevent Intel to produce and sell ARM itself? In fact what's to prevent Intel to produce the best ARM socs as it has arguably the best fabs?There are rumors that Apple is asking Intel to produce procs for them, this would certainly be very interesting if it proves to be true.
thebeastie - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
The fact that Intel would practically look at other businesses then produce SoC/CPUs for $10 each, x86 or ARM based doesn't matter in the face of such high portability of code.Metaluna - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
The problem is that ARM cores are pretty much a commodity, so ARM SoC pricing is inevitably going to end up as a race to the bottom. This could make it difficult for Intel to sustain the kind of margins it needs to keep it's superior process R&D efforts going. Or at least, it would need to use its high-margin parts to subsidize R&D for the commodity stuff which could get tricky given the overall slowing of the market for the higher end processors. I think this is what's happening with the supposed Apple deal. There have been reports that they have excess capacity at 22nm right now so it makes sense to use it. And, since Apple only sells its processors as part of its phones and tablets, it doesn't directly compete with x86 on the open market.Of course, all the other fabs are operating under the same cost constraints, so there would be an overall slower pace of process improvements (which is happening anyway as we get closer to the absolute limits at <10nm).
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link
And so does those companies, run into bottom. What can they do to even their R&D, by put the server chip into mobile phone?Krysto - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link
Yup. This is actually Intel's biggest threat by far. It's not the technical competition (even though Intel's Atom servers don't seem nearly as competitive as these upcoming ARM servers), but the biggest problem by far for them will be that they will have to compete with the dozen or so ARM server companies on price, while having more or less the same performance.THAT is what will kill Intel in the long term. Intel is not a company built to last on Atom-like profits (which will get even lower once the ARM servers flood the market). And they can forget about their juicy Core profits in a couple of years.
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link
So your argument is because the ARM solution is more expensive than Intel solution now, therefore it must be cheaper than Intel solution in the feature? The mobile ARM is cheap, so does the Intel mobile chips.Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
1300$ difference / server, that's a lot electricity you have to spare to justify the cost, especially as it is better that Xeon servers only in a few chosen benchmarks.Can't see how this is interesting in production environment.
It's more for testing / experimenting I guess;
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
The savings are more than just electricity cost, you also save on cooling costs and can pack your server room more densely. If you do a TCO calculation over several years it might well turn out to be cheaper overall.This is the first ARM server solution, so it's partly to get the software working and test the market. However I was surprised how competitive it is already, especially when you realize they use a relatively slow 40nm Cortex-A9. The 2nd generation using 28nm A15 will be out in about 6 months, if they manage to double performance per core at similar cost and power then it will look even better.