Benchmark Configuration

First of all, a big thanks to Wannes De Smet, who assisted me the benchmarks. Below you can read the configuration details of our "real servers". The Atom machines are a mix of systems. The Atom 230 is part of a 1U server featuring a Pegatron IPX7A-ION motherboard with 4GB of DDR2-667. The N450 is found inside an ASUS EeePC netbook, and the Atom N2800 is part of Intel's DN2800MT Marshalltown mainboard. The latter has 4GB of DDR3-1333 while the former only has 1GB of DDR2-667.

Supermicro SYS-6027TR-D71FRF Xeon E5 server (2U Chassis)
CPU Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2660 (2.2GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 95W)
Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2650L (1.8GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 70W)
RAM 64/128GB (8/16x8GB) DDR3-1600 Samsung M393B1K70DH0-CK0
Motherboard X9DRT-HIBFF
Chipset Intel C600
BIOS version R 1.1a
PSU PWS-1K28P-SQ 1280W 80 Plus Platinum

The Xeon E5 CPUs have four memory channels per CPU and support DDR3-1600, and thus our dual CPU configuration gets eight DIMMs for maximum bandwidth. Each core supports Hyper-Threading, so we're looking at 16 cores with 32 threads.

Boston Viridis Server
CPU 24x ECX-1000 4c Cortex-A9 1.4GHz
RAM 24x Netlist 4GB (96GB) low-voltage ECC PC3L-10600W-9-10-ZZ DRAM
Motherboard 6x EC-cards
Chipset none
Firmware version ECX-1000-v2.1.5
PSU SuperMicro PWS-704P-1R 750Watt

Common Storage System

An iSCSI LIO Unified Target accesses a DataON DNS-1640 DAS. Inside the DAS we have set up eight Intel SSDSA2SH032G1GN (X25-E 32GB SLC) in RAID-0.

Software Configuration

The Xeon E5 server runs VMware ESXi 5.1. All vmdks use thick provisioning, independent, and persistent. The power policy is "Low Power". We chose the "Low Power" policy as this enables C-states while the impact on performance is minimal. All other systems use Ubuntu 12.10. The power management policy is "ondemand". This enables P-states on the Atom and Calxeda ECX-1000.

Software Support & The ARM Server CPU Measuring Bandwidth
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  • Madpacket - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    And all of a sudden AMD's acquisition of SeaMicro is starting to make sense. Thanks Johan, great article!
  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    I really really hope they downscale the current SeaMicro's soon. Because with a starting price at $139000, they are not catering to the typical SME :-).
  • joshv - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    It seems this has a very narrow application in VM hosting, but I am not sure it's applicable when you have the choice of just scaling up memory or process usage of the single instance Xeon server. For example, I could load 24 instances of my production middle tier on the ARM server - or I could run one instance on a Xeon server and give it all the memory and make sure it spawns enough threads to keep all the internal cores busy. Perhaps my middle tier software has issues with handling all that RAM, so maybe I run 4 instances of it as a process, not a biggy.

    I am going to bet that the Xeon server will win as it won't have the VM overhead.
  • Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    I would be interested in a bare metal comparison. Since you're serving up the same app why would you split it between 24 VMs on the Xeon server? It's a bit contrived.

    Just load up Server 2012 and IIS or Linux + Apache straight up on the Xeon and see how it performs.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    Very interesting!

    I'd prefer a fat machine with virtualized servers to get automatic load balancing, but it's not like one couldn't shuffle tasks around in the ARM farm. And there's room for improvement: be it the next Atom or the memory controller in the current ECX-1000 CPUs. And take a look at how badly they scale from 2 to 4 threads - surely, there's lot's of rooms left!
  • rubyl - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    What is the average CPU utilization for the Viridis nodes and for the Xeon system under the 5 different concurrency loads (for the 24 webserver workload)?
  • gercho - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    When you said " 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 A15 offers 50% higher single-threaded integer performance at slightly higher power levels and can address up to 16GB of RAM." As far as I know the A15 cores have 50% more performance but consume 3X more power, that's not "slightly".........
  • nofumble62 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    50% more performance at 3X more power... reminding me of the Netburst architect.
  • thenewguy617 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    Can you please point me to sources of your number?
    Thanks
  • Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    Where on earth you do get that 3x from? So far no 28nm Cortex-A15 chips have been released. The A15 in the Exynos Octo uses about 1.25W per core at 1.8GHz according to Samsung. That's slightly more power than a Calxeda A9 uses per core, but the A15 gives twice the performance per core.

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