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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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.