ARM on the server

Hi all.

I don’t know if this has been posted or discussed before (I didn’t find it in the forum search, but that doesn’t seem to work), but this gives hope for some serious ARM-based hardware in a few years… :)

http://www.smooth-stone.com/

Regards,

Terje

It’s made el reg too

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/16/smooth_stone_arm_server_chip/

Now renamed Calxeda (which according to the article is Latin for smooth stone).

Possibly the first ARM server has been announced, for anyone interested.

The server rack supports up to eight Cortex-A9 processors, for a total of 16 cores…

Naturally, to be able to use that power for anything on RISC OS would require support for multple-cores...

Aside from the work involving porting RISC OS, that is.

No price is currently given, and there’s also a question of how useful such a system would be for desktop use. For this, Nufront’s offering might be more attractive.

Edit: Some more info for those of us waiting for an ARM-based desktop-computer…

“Nufront aims to sell $250 ARM-based desktop PCs, and use the same platform for ultra-thin and ultra-light laptops, as well as high-performance, multi-tasking tablets.”

Who knows, maybe one day we won’t have to build our own computer cases… :)

Not really about RISC OS, but these developments may contribute to a greater focus on performance for ARM processors:

Microsoft embraces ARM with Windows 8

Furthermore, Nvidia is apparently working on an ARM CPU

I must say I like this graph in the article… :) It says a lot…

From the Nvidia article:

Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist and vice president of research and formerly the chairman of the computer science department at Stanford University, took jabs at the x64 architecture in a blog about the announcement of the Denver ceepie-geepie effort.

“Denver frees PCs, workstations and servers from the hegemony and inefficiency of the x86 architecture,” Dally wrote. “For several years, makers of high-end computing platforms have had no choice about instruction-set architecture. The only option was the x86 instruction set with variable-length instructions, a small register set, and other features that interfered with modern compiler optimizations, required a larger area for instruction decoding, and substantially reduced energy efficiency.

“Denver provides a choice. System builders can now choose a high-performance processor based on a RISC instruction set with modern features such as fixed-width instructions, predication, and a large general register file. These features enable advanced compiler techniques and simplify implementation, ultimately leading to higher performance and a more energy-efficient processor.”

Music to my ears… :)

Microsoft embraces ARM with Windows 8

...I can’t be the only one wondering how feasible would it be to have a RiscPC-style dual OS implementation on the PandaBoard (provided Windows 8 runs single core).

Let’s hope that this will result in a PC style standard motherboards, where one OS runs all of them (albeit requiring drivers to get full function).

I hope they don’t do a games console style system where the OS is locked into the hardware.

I wonder what the situation will be for virtualisation, and also compatibility with old programs. (Will they emulate an x86? I can’t see it being fast enough.

I don’t think that there will be any kind of x86 emulation. Microsoft will offer Office and probably also IE for the ARM platform. I think the main reason for Win 8 on ARM are tablet computers and at the moment there are not many windows applications that are optimized for touchscreen usage anyway. So old win programs may not run on ARM based devices but most of them would also not be usable on a tablet device anyway.

There will probably also be a number of desktop ARM computers runing Windows 8 but they will still be on the low power end compared to “normal” PCs. They might be interesting due to their low power consumption but people must realize that they are no full replacements for an Intel/AMD machine, I guess.

Apparently, there are "1000 engineers working on ARM Windows 8". What a mammoth project – it’ll be interesting to see whether they pull it off by the end of the year!

This may be old hat for many, but Nvidia’s Denver will apparently be a 64-bit ARM-based processor.

While 64-bit registers may be overkill for many applications, for things like High Performance Computing and very large datasets, it may be essential, and Nvidia is aiming also at servers and supercomputers.

For those of us (like me) who struggle to keep the enthusiasm about ARM/RISC OS, it’s good to learn that someone are working to bring the ARM beyond the focus on low power consumption…

• Expect Commercial ARM Servers in 2014

“So old win programs may not run on ARM based devices but most of them would also not be usable on a tablet device anyway.”

Don’t forget that a large chunk of business applications, including web-sites, are developed in pure .NET so would run without modification on ARM Windows. .NET is first compiled into pseudo-code and compiled natively JIT – perfect for a change in the underlying hardware. Mono (alternative .NET runtime) already runs well on ARM.

My experience from 10 years .NET development on Windows x86/x64 is that performance is very good; comparable with C++ in most circumstances and way faster than Java. To put it another way, my development teams have developed no applications in native C/C++ since 2001. Moving to x64 Windows from x86 was painless as a result, and moving to ARM wouldn’t be much different.

Even though it would be great to have RISC OS in use more widely, having ARM under Windows would at least be some kind of result :-)

This may be of interest: Dell’s Copper servers

Each server sled contains four quad-core Armada XP 78460 ARMv7 SoCs running at 1.6 GHz.

"AMD has licensed a 64-bit design from ARM …"

AMD’s ‘Seattle’, a 64-bit ARM processor expected in 2014

8 to 16 ARM Cortex-A57 cores running at 2 GHz or higher.

That’s the 64bit core. So it’s ARM, but not as we know it.

I know, it’s radically changed.

Java SE support now agreed with Oracle:

• ZDNet
• M2M
• silicon.fr (including historical note about the NC)
• LeMonde Informatique

Now renamed Calxeda

…and subsequently shut down in Dec 2013.

“The specification will spell out things like memory locations, how individual elements of the SoC can be describable and discoverable at boot, CPU features that must be present – it really talks about mandatory hardware that must exist.”

Hurrah!

Now we just need some SoCs that implement the standard. And a compatible port of RISC OS, of course.

ARM servers now available in AWS: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_a1/

I think this makes Amazon the first of the big cloud providers to offer ARM servers.

I wonder how well an ARM hypervisor on that would run the RO benchmarks.

I suspect that others were, like me, expecting it to be somewhat longer before an ARM core server was competing with the Intel offerings.

I think this makes Amazon the first of the big cloud providers to offer ARM servers.

With a cost per hour that is half the cost of the competitors I think the ‘drift’ to ARM might be more rally car rear end than continental. The big boys don’t make money by paying out double what they need to.