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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JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Thanks!SunLord - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Hmm if these didn't cost $20,000 they would make a nice front end for larger websites and forums using less rack space and power. What setup using these would you use for anandtech? Would you guys keep the intel DB server?Gunbuster - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I just got a Dell R720xd decked out with 384GB and 4.3TB of storage for a hair over that price.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Intel Xeons are still by far a better choice for relational databases that are very hard to split up (sharding is only a last resort)zachj - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I'm not sure I agree with the absolutism that seems imlicit in your comment that Xeons are better for relational databases...I think there are cases where that won't be true.Database scale-out doesn't always require sharding...using any of a number of different off-the-shelf capabilities built right into most SQL engines, you can create multiple active replicas of your database. This is generally better-suited to workloads that aren't write-intensive, but both clustering and replication allow for writes. While this may seem like a quick-and-dirty solution that is architecturally "less good" than sharding, hardware is a lot cheaper than paying people to design a sharding solution and the dollars very often drive the conversation. As long as the database size isn't terribly large this can be a very cost-effective way to scale out a database.
I would wager that the Anandtech website database (not the forum database) would probably be well-suited to this type of scale-out. You do waste some money on redundant storage but you more than make up for that cost by not having to pay a development team to implement sharding. If the comments section of the Anandtech website gets stored in the same underlying database, the size constraints and the write activity may appear to be incompatible with this approach, but I would in fact argue that comments don't require relational capabilities of SQL and would be more rightly stored as blobs in Hadoop or Azure Storage Tables. Then the Anandtech database is strictly articles and is both much more compact and almost entirely read-only (except for a few new articles per day).
rwei - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
To the best of my understanding, replication does well for scaling reads but doesn't do much for writes. I'd still imagine that this would work decently well with AnandTech, where I can't see the volume of writes being that large relative to the volume of reads.Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
They would make a horrible front end for such websites. Just buy a single Xeon server and don't artificially limit it by using 24 VMs. Just run the app straight on the metal and it will perform massively better.Oldboy1948 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Very interesting Johan as your tests often are!Interesting that the memory bw is so much lower than anything from Intel. In fact Iphone 5 looks much better...why? Only Intel has about the same rsults in compress and decompress.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Where did you see the stream results on the A6? I might have missed it somewhere. The only ones I could find reported only 1 GB/s in Triad. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6298/analyzing-iphon... The Quad ECX-1000 got 1.8 GB/sPCTC2 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Do you know what would be an interesting concept for a future version of these cluster-in-a-box systems? A solution like ScaleMP. ScaleMP is basically a reverse VM. A hypervisor on each server clusters together to run a single OS with an aggregation of all resources (cores, RAM, network, and disk). ScaleMP running on 4x Dual-socket 8-core Xeon systems w/ 32GB RAM results in a usable system with 64-cores and 128GB RAM as if it was running natively on the hardware. This would be an interesting concept to transfer to the ARM space (if a form of hardware virtualization ever is designed). In a box like this, there would be 192 cores and 192GB of RAM available to a single Fedora instance. Cluster 2 of these together and suddenly there's a system with 384 cores and 384GB of RAM in 4U. Just some food for thought.