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
Software Support
Calxeda supports Ubuntu and Fedora, though any distribution based on the (32-bit) ARM Linux kernel should in theory be able to run on the EnergyCore SoCs. As for availability, there are already prebuilt Highbank kernel images available in the Ubuntu ARM repository and Calxeda has set up a PPA of its own to ease its kernel development.
The company has also joined Linaro—the non-profit organization aiming to bring the open source ecosystem to ARM SoCs.
The ARM Server CPU
A dual Xeon E5 or Opteron 6300 server has much more processing power than most of us need to run one server application. That is the reason why it is not uncommon to see 10, 20 or even more virtual machines running on top of them. Extremely large databases and HPC applications are the noticeable exceptions, but in general, server purchasers are rarely worried about whether or not the new server will be fast enough to run one application.
Returning to our Boston Viridis server, the whole idea behind the server is not to virtualize but to give each server application its own physical node. Each server node has one quad-core Cortex-A9 with 4MB of L2 cache and 4GB of RAM. With that being the case, the question "what can this server node cope with?" is a lot more relevant. We will show you a real world load further in this review, but we thought it would be good to first characterize the performance profile of the EnergyCore-1000 at 1.4GHz. We used four different benchmarks: Stream, 7z LZMA compression, 7z LZMA decompression, and make/gcc building and compiling.
We compare the ECX-1000 (quad-core, 3.8~5W, 40nm) with an Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz single-core plus Hyper-Threading, 4W TDP, 45nm), Atom N450 (1.66GHz single-core + HTT, 5.5W TDP, 45nm), Atom N2800 (1.86GHz dual-core + HTT, 6.5W, 32nm), and an Intel Xeon E5-2650L (1.8-2.3GHz octal-core, 70W TDP, 32nm).
The best comparable Atom would be the Atom S1200, which is Intel's first micro-server chip. However the latter was not available to us yet, but we are actively trying to get Intel's latest Atom in house for testing. We will update our numbers as soon as we can get an Atom S1200 system. The Atom N2800 should be very close to the S1200, as it has the same architecture, L2 cache size, TDP, and runs at similar clockspeeds. The Atom N2800 supports DDR3-1066 while Centerton will support DDR3-1333, but we have reason to believe (see further) that this won't matter.
The Atom 230/330 and N450 are old 45nm chips (2008-2010). And before you think using the Atom 230 and N450 is useless: the Atom architecture has not changed for years. Intel has lowered the power consumption, increased the clockspeed, and integrated a (slightly) faster memory controller, but essentially the Atom 230 has the same core as the latest Atom N2000. I quote Anand as he puts it succinctly: "Atom is in dire need of an architecture update (something we'll get in 2013)."
So for now, the Atom 230 and N450 numbers give us a good way to evaluate how the improvements in the "uncore" impact server performance. It is also interesting to see where the ECX-1000 lands. Does it outperform the N2800, or is just barely above the older Atom cores?
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Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Yeah, should have had two teams - each with goal to optimize on each platform. The Xeon team would not (lol) load up 24 VM's to serve the same web app. It's silly. Go bare metal in that use case.There will be different needs for different cases. The "lets load up a bunch of VMs" is useful to cloud providers and in other cases, but not for "I want to feed this app to as many users as possible".
dig23 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
Interesting article and great first effort but felt bit outdated on both ATOM as well as ARM front, I am not blaming you, just saying.JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
Outdated in what sense? No one else has really made a serious attempt to review thee Calxedas stuff, and while there are better Atom option out there, as Johan notes we were unable to get any in-house in time for testing. Or do you mean Calxedas' use of Cortex-A9 is outdated? If so, that's more of a case of laying the groundwork I think. Assuming they have their A15 option be backwards compatible with the current system (e.g. just get a new set of cards with the updated SoCs), that would be very cool.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I can only agree with Jarred. There are no A15 server chips AFAIK, and unless I have missed a launch, I think the Atom N2800 is not outdated at all (Dec 2011).aryonoco - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
This was a fabulous and most informative write up. You answered so many of my questions with this article. Excellent job covering an area that no one else is, and also kudos for running such great benchmarks.This really is tech journalism at its best. Thank you Johan, and thank you Anand for employing such high-quality writers.
We all know how memory constrained the ARM A9 is. Even something like Krait would solve a lot of A9's traditional weak areas. And yet, it looks like the Calxeda makes sense in enough niches to be sustain their R&D and development efforts. Low-to-medium traffic web hosting, media streaming and storage. Each one of those areas is a sizeable market and the Calxeda solution offers enough to be seriously considered in these makets.
And when one thinks about how many years of x86 optimisation has gone into the toolchain in things like the gcc, one realises the potential that lies ahead for ARM in this market. ARM's future roadmap is well known, next is Cortex A15 and then Cortex A57. Meanwhile there will be more software optimisation, and the management/deployment side will also improve. With all these in mind, I think it's more than conceivable that ARM will grab up to 20% marketshare in the server market by 2015.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Thanks! Good summary... and indeed 20% marketshare is not impossible. The real questions is whether Intel give the Atom it is long overdue architecture update, or will Haswell put some pressure from above? Exciting times.beginner99 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Isn't it much easier to administer 24 virtual servers than 24 physical ones (cost of personnel)? When all servers have the same workload it look sgood for ARM but the virtualized intel environment easily wins if some servers get a lot more requests than others, meaning too much for one ARM SOC to handle. The tested scenario is basically the best one could ever hope for the ARM server and pretty unrealistic (same load for all servers). That's fine but then also post worst-case scenarios...Intel server is a lot more flexible.hardwaremister - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I completely agree with the other readers that this writing is just absolutely superb. Fantastic novel job Johan.However, I also agree with the above commenter: a big part coup on virtualizing a "fat" core system is to be able to properly utilize the resources of the machine across VMs. By equally loading "tiny tiles", the obvious advantage of the inherent load balancing of a virtualized infrastructure completely disappears.
Under current the current "fat" VM infrastructure you can accomodate individual VMs with heterogeneous loading levels, with extra provisioning in the resource pool.
That is just not simply the case for these tests based on an army of individual machines against a many VMs virtualized under a few "fat" cpus.
I don't mean to be overcritical, but this is a proper apples vs oranges comparison.
bobbozzo - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
A lot of shared hosting ISP's use lightweight virtualization with Linux or BSD "Containers". I would like to see you re-benchmark with those on both servers instead of using VMs.You should see higher performance vs full virtualization. I'm not sure how it would affect the ARM performance, but it shouldn't hurt much, and there is more potential for better load sharing if some sites are busier than others.
Jambe - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Surprising, indeed! Thoroughgoing as usual, and excellently written.