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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thenewguy617 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I would like to see the results with the website running on bare metal. I would like to, but I don't believe you when you say the virtualization overhead is minimal.Also, did you include the power used by the switch? as we scale the xeon cluster we will add a lot of cost and power in the network, however Calxeda fabric should scale for free.
thebeastie - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
I think a lot of you are missing the main point or future potential of this server technology. And that is that intel like to make an absolute minimum of $50 per CPU they make, in server CPUs it's more like $300.These Arm CPUs are being sold at around $10 a CPU.
Sure Caldexa have gone the hard yards making such a server and want a lot of money for it. BUT once these ARM servers are priced in relative context of their actual CPu costs its going to be the biggest bomb drop on Intels sever profits in history.
Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
Assuming you are right and ARM is becoming so important that it can't be ignored, what's to prevent Intel to produce and sell ARM itself? In fact what's to prevent Intel to produce the best ARM socs as it has arguably the best fabs?There are rumors that Apple is asking Intel to produce procs for them, this would certainly be very interesting if it proves to be true.
thebeastie - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
The fact that Intel would practically look at other businesses then produce SoC/CPUs for $10 each, x86 or ARM based doesn't matter in the face of such high portability of code.Metaluna - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
The problem is that ARM cores are pretty much a commodity, so ARM SoC pricing is inevitably going to end up as a race to the bottom. This could make it difficult for Intel to sustain the kind of margins it needs to keep it's superior process R&D efforts going. Or at least, it would need to use its high-margin parts to subsidize R&D for the commodity stuff which could get tricky given the overall slowing of the market for the higher end processors. I think this is what's happening with the supposed Apple deal. There have been reports that they have excess capacity at 22nm right now so it makes sense to use it. And, since Apple only sells its processors as part of its phones and tablets, it doesn't directly compete with x86 on the open market.Of course, all the other fabs are operating under the same cost constraints, so there would be an overall slower pace of process improvements (which is happening anyway as we get closer to the absolute limits at <10nm).
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link
And so does those companies, run into bottom. What can they do to even their R&D, by put the server chip into mobile phone?Krysto - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link
Yup. This is actually Intel's biggest threat by far. It's not the technical competition (even though Intel's Atom servers don't seem nearly as competitive as these upcoming ARM servers), but the biggest problem by far for them will be that they will have to compete with the dozen or so ARM server companies on price, while having more or less the same performance.THAT is what will kill Intel in the long term. Intel is not a company built to last on Atom-like profits (which will get even lower once the ARM servers flood the market). And they can forget about their juicy Core profits in a couple of years.
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link
So your argument is because the ARM solution is more expensive than Intel solution now, therefore it must be cheaper than Intel solution in the feature? The mobile ARM is cheap, so does the Intel mobile chips.Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
1300$ difference / server, that's a lot electricity you have to spare to justify the cost, especially as it is better that Xeon servers only in a few chosen benchmarks.Can't see how this is interesting in production environment.
It's more for testing / experimenting I guess;
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
The savings are more than just electricity cost, you also save on cooling costs and can pack your server room more densely. If you do a TCO calculation over several years it might well turn out to be cheaper overall.This is the first ARM server solution, so it's partly to get the software working and test the market. However I was surprised how competitive it is already, especially when you realize they use a relatively slow 40nm Cortex-A9. The 2nd generation using 28nm A15 will be out in about 6 months, if they manage to double performance per core at similar cost and power then it will look even better.