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
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.
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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.