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
Finding a Good Fit
The previous benchmarks have shown that the first Calxeda server is not for the general IT market. As the slide below shows, Calxeda targets four kinds of workloads:
- Web applications
- Middle-tier applications
- Offline analytics
- Storage and file serving
For applications such as Memcache, the ECX-1000 1.4GHz lacks bandwidth and memory capacity. Once a Cortex-A15 based server is available, this can change quickly as performance will improve significantly and the amount of memory per CPU can be quadrupled to 16GB.
We did not test it yet, but our own experience tells us that the majority of the "scale out" applications are out of reach. Especially in the financial and risk modeling world, top performance and ultra low response times are prioritized.
Calxeda based Boston servers are already making inroads as storage servers. There is little doubt that a low power processing unit makes a lot of sense in a storage server.
That leaves the question whether or not Calxeda's latest server can make it in the web server and Content Delivery world. Calxeda claims 5W per server node, and no more than 250W for the complete server chassis with 24 server nodes. That's pretty cool, but currently there is another solution. Two octal-core Xeon E5 deliver no less 32 threads running on top of 16 very potent cores. Add a virtualization layer and you get tens of servers. The only limitation is typically the amount of RAM.
So assume you are a hosting provider. Which server do you use as your building block? You've got two choices:
The standard one, the Intel Xeon E5 server. The advantages are excellent performance whenever you need it, whether your application scales well with more threads or not. The Xeon can address up to 384GB of affordable RAM (16GB DIMMs). If that's not enough, 768GB is possible with more expensive LR-DIMMs.
Those are impressive specs, but what if most of your customers just want to host medium sized web sites, sites that are rich on content but rather low on processing requirements? Can the Boston Viridis server attract such users with a much lower power consumption? How far can you go with slicing and dicing the Xeon's monstruous performance into small virtual pieces? We decided to find out.
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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.