ARM Challenging Intel in the Server Market: An Overview
by Johan De Gelas on December 16, 2014 10:00 AM ESTThe Evolving Server Market
The previous page might give you the impression that we do not give the ARM players a chance against mighty Intel. That is not the case, but we believe that the wrong arguments are often used. Intel's success was also a result of the huge amount of Windows desktop users that were enthusiastic about using their Windows knowledge in a professional environment. The combination of Windows NT and the success of the Pentium Pro was very powerful.
ARM also has such a "Trojan software horse" and it is called the Linux based cloud. We're not saying anything new when we say that cloud services have really taken off and that the Internet of Things will make cloud services even more important. Those cloud services have been creating a tsunami of innovation and are based on open source projects such as Hadoop, Spark, Openstack, MongoDB, Cassandra, good old Apache, and hundreds of others. That software stack is ported or being ported to the ARM software ecosystem.
But you probably knew that. Let's make it more concrete. Just a while ago we visited the Facebook hardware lab. Being a server hardware enthusiast, we felt like a child in a large toy store. Let me introduce you to Facebook's Open Vault, part of the the Open Compute Project:
... is a simple and cost-effective storage solution with a modular I/O topology that’s built for the Open Rack. The Open Vault offers high disk densities, holding 30 drives in a 2U chassis, and can operate with almost any host server.
Mat Corddry, director of hardware of engineering showed us the hardware:
The first incarnation of the "honey badger" micro server is based on Avoton. But nothing is stopping Facebook from using an ARM micro server in their Open Vault machines if it offers the same capabilities and is cheaper and/or lower power. As cheap storage is extremely important in the "Big Data" age, this is just one of the opportunities that the "smaller" ARM server SoCs have. But it also makes another point: they have to beat the Intel SoCs that are already known and used.
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hojnikb - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Wow, i have never motherboard that simple :)CajunArson - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
OK you devote another huge block of text to the typical x86 complexity myth* followed by: Oh, but the ARM chips are superior because they have special-purpose processors that overcome their complete lack of performance (both raw & performance per watt).Uhm... WTF?? I need to have a proprietary, poorly documented add-on processor to make my software work well now? How is that a "standard"? How is requiring a proprietary add-on processor that's not part of any standard and requires boatloads of software cruft working in a "reduced instruction set architecture" exactly?
I might as well take the AVX instruction set for modern x86... which is leagues ahead of anything that ARM has available, and say that x86 is now a "RISC" architecture because the AVX part of x86 is just as clean or cleaner than anything ARM has. I'll just conveniently forget about the rest of x86 just like the ARM guys conveniently forget about all the non-standard "application accelerators" that are required to actually make their chips compete with last-year's Atoms.
* Maybe in a micro-controller setting where you are using a PIC or Arduino the x86 decoding is a real issue, but in a server? Please. Considering the only hard numbers you have show a 2013-model Atom beating a 2015-model ARM server processor, you'll have to try harder.
hlmcompany - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
The article describes ARM chips as becoming more competitive, but still lagging behind...not that they're superior.Kevin G - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
The coprocessor idea is something stems from mainframe philosophy. Historically things like IO requests and encryption were always handled by coprocessors in this market.The reason coprocessors faded away outside of the mainframe market is that it was generally cheaper to do a software implementation. Now with power consumption being more critical than ever, coprocessors are seen as a means to lower overall platform power while increasing performance.
Philosophically, there is nothing that would prevent the x86 line from doing so and for the exact same reasons. In fact with PCIe based storage and NVMe on the horizon in servers, I can see Intel incorporating a coprocessor to do parity calculations for RAID 5/6 in there SoCs.
kepstin - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Intel has already added some instructions in avx and avx2 that vastly improve the performance of software raid5 and 6; the Haswell chip in my laptop has the Linux software raid implementation claiming 24GiB/s raid5 with avx, and 23GiB/s raid6 with avx2 (per core).MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Of course additional power draw for more complex instruction deconding mattes in servers: today they are driven by power-efficiency! The transistors may not matter as much, but in a multi-core environment they add up. Using the quoted statement from AMD of "only 10% more transistors" means one could place 11 RISC cores in the same area for the same cost as 10 otherwise identical x86 cores. Johan said it perfectly with "the ISA is not a game changer, but it matters".And you completely misunderstood him regarding the accelerators. Intel is producing "CPUs for everyone" and hence only providing few accelerators or special instructions. In the ARM ecosystem it's obvious that vendors are searching niches and are willing to provide custom solutions for it - hence the chance is far higher that they provide some accelerator which might be game-changing for some applications.
This doesn't mean the architecture has to rely entirely on them, neither does it mean they have to be undocumented. The accelerators do not even have to be faster than software solutions, as long as they're easy enough to work with and provide significant power savings. Intel is doing just that with special-purpose hardware in their own GPUs.
And don't act as if much would have changed in the Atom space ever since 22 nm Silvermont cores appeared. It doesn't matter if it's from 2013 or 2015 - it's all just the same core.
OreoCookie - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
What's with all the unnecessary piss and vinegar?All CPU vendors rely increasingly on specialized silicon, newer Intel CPUs feature special crypto instructions (AES-NI) and Quick Sync, for instance. Adding special purpose hardware to augment the system (in the past usually done for performance reasons) is quite old, just think of hardware RAID cards and video »accelerators« (which are not called GPUs). The reason that Intel doesn't add more and more of these is that they build general purpose CPUs which are not optimized for a specific workload (the article gives a few examples). In other environments (servers, mobile) the workload is much more clearly defined, and you can indeed take advantage of accelerators.
The biggest advantage of ARM cpus is flexibility -- the ARM ecosystem is built on the idea to tailor silicon to your demands. This is also a substantial reason why Intel's efforts in the mobile market have been lackluster. Recently, Synology announced a new professional NAS (the DS2015xs) which was ARM-based rather than Intel-based. Despite its slower CPU cores, the throughput of this thing is massive -- in part, because it sports two (!) 10 GBit ethernet ports out of the box. Vendors are looking for niches where ARM-based servers could gain a foothold, so they are trying a lot of things and see what sticks.
goop666666 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
LOL! Most of the comments here like this one seem to be written by people who think computers should all be like gaming machines or something.Here'a tip: no-one cares about "complexity," "standardization," "RISC," or anything else you mention. All they care about in the target market for ARM server chips is price, performance and power, and I mean ALL THREE.
On this Intel cannot compete. They sell wildly overpriced legacy hardware propped up by massive R&D expenditures and they're wedded to that model. The rest of the industry is wedded to the new and cheap model. Just like how the industry moved to mobile devices and Intel stood still, this change will also wash over Intel while they sit still in denial.
There's a reason why Intel stock has gone no-where for years.
nlasky - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Jan 8, 2010, Intel stock price $20.83. Dec 19, 2010, Intel stock price $36.37. If by gone no-where in for years you mean increased by 70% I guess you would be correct. Intel can't compete because they are wedded to their model? They have a profit margin of 20% and an operating margin of 27%. They could easily cut prices to compete with any ARM offerings. Servers have been around forever, unlike the mobile computing platform. Intel has an even larger stranglehold on this industry than ARM has in the mobile space. Here's a tip - stop spewing a bunch of uniformed nonsense just to make an argument.nlasky - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
*Dec 19, 2014