The Next Generation of Micro Server SoCs: ECX-2000 vs Atom 2000
by Johan De Gelas on October 29, 2013 5:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Enterprise
- Intel
- Arm
- Calxeda
- Avoton
The benchmarking team of Intel Portland did their best to produce some really interesting benchmarks at the last server workshop in San Francisco, but many of the benchmarks did not work well on the ECX-1000 due to the very limited 4 GB RAM capacity. The most interesting benchmark can be found below: a front end web performance benchmark with high network traffic.
In this benchmark, Intel finally admits that the S1260 is nothing to be excited about. The Intel findings are very similar to ours: the ECX-1000 beats the the Atom S1260 by a wide margin in typical server workloads. So where will the ECX-2000 end up? We can not be sure, but we can roughly estimate that it will land somewhere between being 3 to 4 times faster than the Atom S1260. That is not enough to beat the Atom C2750, but that is after all a 20W TDP chip and the top SKU. Digging deeper in the Intel docs, we find that the C2730 at 1.7 GHz (12 W TDP) consumes about 20W for the whole server node (16 GB and 250 GB HD) and the C2750 about 28W when running SPECint_rate_2006. The harddisk will have consumed very little, since the SPECint_rate_2006 benchmark runs out of memory.
The ECX-2000 at 1.8 GHz will probably need roughly 12-16W per server node. So our first rough estimates tell us that the C2730 is out of the (performance) reach of the ECX-2000, and that Calxeda's estimate of the C2530 is right on the mark.
However, the story does not end there. The total power consumption of the ECX-1000 based Boston Viridis server we tested was remarkably low, the very efficient network fabric made sure there was little "power overhead" (PHYs, Backplane,...). This Fleet Fabric has been improved even further, so there is a good chance that the ECX-2000 based servers will offer a very competitive performance/watt, although the Atom C2730 has an edge when the application benefits from more threads. But when that is not the case, i.e. scaling is mediocre beyond 4 threads, the tables might turn. Anyway, there is a very good chance that the ECX-2000 is very competitive with the 4-core Atoms, to say the least.
There is indeed a reason why HP will use the Calxeda SoC in its new Moonshot server cluster in 2014. The picture above shows such a moonshot module. We felt that the Atom S1260 SoC was a bad match for the HP moonshot, but "HP's Moonshot 2.0" will be an entirely different story. And for those of us with less cash to burn we are looking forward what Penguin computing and Boston will make off their ECX-2000 based server.
Next stop, the 64-bit SoC code-named “Sarita,” based upon the 50% faster Cortex-A57 core, which is pin-compatible with the ECX-1000 and new ECX-2000. This reduces development time and expense for the ODMs. But right now, we can look forward to some interesting microserver comparisons in Q1 2014...
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azazel1024 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Granted, it is in no way comparable as the multithreaded performance probably falls WAY short, but as an interesting power consumption comparitor, my home server is based on a G1620 Ivy Bridge chip, uATX board (I forget the make, but H77 based, I want to say Gigabit?), 8GB of memory (2x4GB 1.25v), a pair of Intel CT gigabit NICs (motherboard port disabled), 60GB SSD for a boot/app disc and a pair of 2TB Samsung F4EG drives in RAID0 and a 80+ Bronze 350w PSU.Whole thing pulls down 21w at idle and 32w with the drives spun up streaming. During heavy computational loads (as a simple test) the whole system pulls down a hair over 50W with both cores at 90+% and the HDD spun up.
I'd personally love to see the system as a whole pull down half those numbers. I really am curious looking, more from a comodity/lower requirement stand point, the newer Atom based Celeron and Pentium chips.
I'd be curious to see if anything exists with at least four SATA 6Gbps ports, RAID0/1/5 support, soldered on Atom based Pentium chip and at least one Intel based GbE port (with the option to stick another CT NIC in the PCI-e slot). Something tells me though that the newest celeron and pentium based atoms don't have support for 4 SATA 6Gbps ports though.
Gondalf - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
At least IMO, Calxeda is sandbagging a little about power consumption. A15 core is very power hungry, expecially over 1.6Ghz and Silvermont core has clearly showed a far lower power consumption under load.Dear Johan i can see a lot of marketing in Calxeda data, its pretty clear that this round is won by Intel with a wide margin.
Maybe we need to wait some SPECpower submissions before any judgment. "Rough estimates" means nothing beacause Calxeda do not gives TDP data but only "average consumption" figures.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Last time, Calxeda marketing was simply wrong about their servers being good memcached or CDN servers. But we found that their power numbers were pretty close to reality. So they deserve the benefit of the doubt...We won't know until we unleash our server workloads on real machine, of course.Drumsticks - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Does calxeda do any custom changes to the A15? Or do they just straight up use what arm effectively gives them?JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
They do not alter the core AFAIK, most of the engineering goes to the uncore. And IMHO that is the right way to do it for a company like Calxedatwotwotwo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
The thing about the preannouncement of the A53/7 and Intel's roadmap is that it's always hard not to wonder how microservers based on the *next* uarch will do. :)DARBYOTHRULL - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
My question is, where can you buy these processors? I wouldn't mind using one for a personal server.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The problem is that the integrated fabric might be a bit too complicated (= expensive mobo) for your usage model. There are probably better solutions for you on the market.DARBYOTHRULL - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
That is probably true, and thank you for your comment. If only I knew where to find them, it just seems difficult to build a custom Atom system.chavv - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
What OS/apps are these server SOCs supposed to run on?