ARM Challenging Intel in the Server Market: An Overview
by Johan De Gelas on December 16, 2014 10:00 AM ESTConclusions So Far
Of one thing we are sure: the "cheaper, smaller, higher volume option historically wins" is a very weak argument to make when claiming that ARM SoCs will overtake Intel in the server market. It is hard to make all of the puzzle pieces come together: performance, power, volume, and software. Low prices and volume are not enough. We would love to see some real competition in the server market, but Intel is a lot better positioned today to fend off attacks than the RISC players were back in the 90s.
The current ARM server SoCs are a lot more powerful than Calxeda's ECX-1000, but they do not face a hopelessly outdated Atom S1200 anymore. The Atom C2000 is a huge step forward and the Xeon E3 has continued to evolve in such a way that even eight of the best ARM cores cannot deliver more raw integer processing power than a quad-core E3 with SMT. Meanwhile, the Xeon-D will offer all the advantages of the high performance "Broadwell" architecture, the flexibility of Intel's Turbo Boost, Intel's excellent process technology, and the highly integrated Atom C2000 SoC in one very competitive package.
The first – albeit very rough – performance data indicates that the server ARMada is not ready (yet?) to take on the best Intel Xeons in a broad range of server applications, at least in terms of performance. However, the ARM challengers do have an opportunity. Despite the massive number of Intel SKUs, Intel's market segmentation is rather crude and assumes that all customers can easily be categorized into three (maybe four) large groups: For low budgets, get the low range Xeon E3 (e.g. E3-1220 v3). Pay a bit more and you get Hyper-Threading and higher clock speeds (E3-1240 v3). Pay slightly more and you get another speed bump. Pay much more and you get four memory channels. We'll throw in more cores and a larger cache as a bonus (Xeon E5).
What if I have a badly scaling HPC application (low core count) that needs a lot of memory bandwidth? There is no Xeon E3 with quad channel. What if I need massive amounts of memory but moderate processing power? The Xeon E3 only supports 32GB. What if my application needs lots of cores and bandwidth but does not benefit from large and slow LLC caches? There is no Xeon E5 for that; I can only choose one of the most expensive E5s. And these examples are not invented; applications like these exist in the real world and are not exotic exceptions. What if my application benefits from a certain hardware accelerator? Buy a few 100k of SoCs and we'll talk. Intel's market segmentation is based largely on the assumption that every need (I/O, caches, memory bandwidth, memory capacity) is proportional to processing power.
The ARM based challengers have the potential to serve those "odd" but relatively large markets better. The cost to develop new SoCs is lower and ARMv8 has the inherent RISC advantage of spending fewer transistors on ISA complexity. This lowers the Intel advantage of process technology leadership.
Cavium has a clear focus and targets the scale-out, telecom, and storage markets. We are very curious how the first chip which is specialized for "scale-out" applications will perform. It has been a long time since we have seen such a specialized SoC and it is crystal clear that performance will vary a lot depending on the application. Our first impression is that the chip will be ideal running lots of network intensive virtual machines on top of a hypervisor, such as Xen or KVM.
AppliedMicro's X-Gene seems to target a much wider range of applications, attacking the Intel Xeon E3 and the fastest Atom C2000. The hardware accelerators and quad-channel memory should give it an edge in some server applications while staying close enough in others. Much will depend on how quickly the X-Gene 2 is available in real servers. The X-Gene 2 "ShadowCat" is already up and running, so we have high hopes.
Broadcom seems to have a similar approach. Broadcom is late but is a market leader with deep pockets and an impressive list of customers. The same is true for Qualcomm. But we needs specs and not just broad and vague statements before we dedicate more words to the server plans of Qualcomm.
AMD's Opteron A1100 is definitely betting on undercutting Intel's low-end Xeons in price and features. Everything about it screams "time to market, inexpensive but proven low power design". The more ambitious AMD ARM SoCs will come later, however, as the current A1100 is missing a crucial feature: a link to the Freedom Fabric. The network fabric is a critical feature as OEMs can then build a low power, high performance networked micro server cluster. It was the strongest point of the Calxeda based servers as it kept power per node low, offered very low latency network, and lowered the investments in expensive network gear (Cisco et al.). AMD is a well known brand with the enterprise folks and has a lot of unique server/HPC IP.
Last but not least, many enterprises in the IT world including HP, Facebook and Google want to see more competition in the server market. So all ARM licensees can count on some goodwill to make it happen.
We from our side have been preparing as well. We have developed several new benchmarks to test this new breed of servers. Hard numbers say more than just words, but you'll have to wait for part two of this series for those.
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beginner99 - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Agree. I just don't see it. What wasn't mentioned or I might have missed is Intels turbo technology. Does ARM have anything similar? Single-threaded performance matters. If a websites takes double the time to be built by the server the user can notice this. And given complexity of modern web sites this is IMHO a real issue. Latency or "service time" is greatly affected by single-threaded performance. That's why visualization is great. Put tons of low-usage stuff on the same physical server and yet each request profits from the single-threaded performance.Now these ARM guys are targeting this high single-threaded performance but why would any company change? Whole software stack would have to change as well at don't forget the software usually cost way, way more than the hardware it runs on. So if you save 10% on the SOC you maybe save less than 1% on the total BOM including software. They can't win on price and on performance/watt Intel still hast best process. So no i don' see it except for niche markets like these Mips SOCs from cavium.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
"Xeon performance at ridiculous prices" I just don't get the "ridiculous prices" comment. To me, it seems like hardware these days is so cheap they are practically giving it away. I remember in the days of NT 4.0 Servers we paid $40K each for dual socket Dell systems with 16 GB Ram.A few years later we were doing Windows 2000 Server on Dell 2850's that were less than half the price.
Then in 2007 we went the VMWare route on Dell 2950's where the price actually went up to $23K but we were getting dual sockets/8 cores and 32GB of RAM so they made the $40K servers we bought years before look like toys.
Four years later we got R-710's that were dual socket/12 cores and 64GB or RAM and made the $23K 2950's look like clunkers but the price was once again almost half at about $12K.
Today we are looking at replacing the R-710's with the latest generation which will be even more cores and more RAM for about the same price.
So to me, the prices don't seem ridiculous at all. The servers themselves now make up only a fraction of our hardware costs with the expensive items being SAN storage. But that too is a lot cheaper. We are looking at going from our two SANS with 4GB fiber channel connections to a single SAN with 10GB Ethernet and more storage than the two old units combined...but still costing less than the old SANs did for just one. So prices there are expensive but less than half of what we paid in 2007 for more storage.
The real costs in the environment are in Software licensing and not I'm not talking about Microsoft or even VMware. Licensing those products are chump change compared to the Enterprise Software crooks...that's where the real costs are. The infrastructure of servers, storage and "plumbing" sorts of software like Windows Server and VMWare are cheap in comparison.
mrdude - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Great article, JohanI think the last page really describes why so many people, myself included, feel that ARM servers/vendors have a very good chance of entrenching themselves in the market. Server workloads are more complex and varied today than they ever have been in the past and it isn't high volume either: the Facebook example is a good one. These companies buy hardware by the truckload and can benefit immensely from customization that Intel may not have on offer.
To add to that, what wasn't mentioned is that ARM, due to its 'license everything' business model, provides these same companies the opportunity to buy ready-made bits of uArch and, with a significantly smaller investment, build them own as-close-to-ideal SoC/CPU/co-processor that they need.
Competition is a great thing for everyone.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
True. Although it seems that only AMD really went for the "license almost everything" model of ARM.mrdude - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Yep. And that's likely due to the budget/timing constraints. I think they were gunning for the 'first to market' branding but they couldn't meet their own timelines. Something of a trend with that company. I'm curious as to why we haven't heard a peep from AMD or partners regarding performance or perf-per-watt. Iirc, we were supposed to see Seattle boards in Q3 of 2014.I also feel like ARM isn't going to stop at the interconnect. There's still quite a bit of opportunity for them to expand in this market.
cjs150 - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Ultimately, my interest in servers is limited but I would like a simple home server that would tie all my computers, NAS, tablets and the other bits and bobs that a geek household has.witeken - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Who's interested in Intel's data center strategy, can watch Diane Bryant's recent presentation (including PDF): http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/im/2014/live_im.... The Q&A from 2013 also has some comments about ARM servers: http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/im/2013/live_im....Kevin G - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
"Now combine this with the fact that Windows on Alpha was available." - Except that Windows NT was available for Alpha. There was a beta for Windows 2000 in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors for the curious.I disagree with the reason why Intel beat the RISC players. Two of the big players were defeated by corporate politics: Alpha and PA-RISC were under the control of HP who was planning to migrate to Itanium. That leaves POWER, SPARC, MIPs and Intel's own Itanium architecture at the turn of the millennium. Of those, POWER and SPARC are still around as they continue to execute. So the only two victims that can be claimed by better execution is MIPs and Intel's own Itanium.
While IBM and Oracle are still executing on hardware, the Unix market as a whole has decreased in size as a whole. The software side isn't as strong as it'd use to be. Linux has risen and proven itself to be a strong competitor to the traditional Unix distribution. Open source software has emerged to fill many of the roles Unix platforms were used to. Further more, many of these applications like Hadoop and Casandra are designed to be clustered and tolerate node failures. No need to spend extra money on big iron hardware if the software doesn't need that level of RAS for uptime. The general lower cost of Linux and open source software (though they're not free due to the need for support) combined with furhter tightening of budgets during the great recession has made many businesses reconsider their Unix platforms.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
My main argument was that the RISC market was fragmented, and not comparable to what the x86 market is now (Intel dominating with a very large software base).While I agree with many of your points, you can not say that SPARC is not a victim. In 90ies, Sun had a very broad product range from entry-level workstation to high-end server. The same is true for the Power CPUs.
Kevin G - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
The RISC market was fragmented on both hardware and software. The greatest example of this would be HP that had HPUX, Tru64, OpenVMS, and Nonstop as operating system and tried to get them all migrated to a common hardware platform: Itanium. How each platform handled backwards compatibility with their RISC roots was different (and Tru64 was killed in favor of HPUX).The midrange RISC workstation suffered the same fate as the dual socket x86 workstation market: good enough hardware and software existed for less. The race to 1Ghz between Intel and AMD cut out the performance advantage RISC platforms carried. Not to say that the RISC a chips didn't improve performance but vendors never took steps to improve their price. Window 2000 and the rise of Linux early in the 2000's gave x86 a software price advantage too while having good enough reliability.
Sun's hardware business did suffer some horrible delays which helped lead the company into Oracle's acquisition. Notably was the Rock chip which featured out-of-order execution but also out-of-order instruction retirement. Sun was never able to validate any prototype silicon and ship it to customers.