Intel endorses Micro Server Market Segment, offers low power Atom and Xeon

Even since the Intel Atom was introduced I have been asking when there would be little green servers for those cases where low power is a higher priority.

ZDNet covers the Intel Announcement.

Intel builds its microserver, ARM hedges

By Larry Dignan | March 15, 2011, 3:48pm PDT

Summary

Intel doesn’t do wimpy chips and made its name pushing performance. But just in case this crazy microserver thing takes off Intel wants you to know it has a master plan.

Intel doesn’t do wimpy chips and made its name pushing performance. But just in case this crazy ARM-based microserver thing takes off Intel wants you to know it has a master plan.

In a briefing Tuesday, Intel executives rolled out its plan for microservers, small low-power units that are used in large-scale environments deployed by the likes of Facebook. The plan: Release new Xeons that are built for microservers.

…

Here’s a look at Intel’s money slide from its microserver talk:

The Intel news room has a press release.

Chip Shot: Intel Outlines Low-Power Micro Server Strategy

Posted by Patrick Darling on Mar 15, 2011 9:52:52 AM

Intel disclosed its roadmap for low-power processors for the emerging micro server category today, including a new server processor based on the Intel® Atom™ processor microarchitecture targeted for 2012. Micro servers share infrastructure resources and are ideal for workloads where many low-power, dense servers may be more efficient than fewer, more robust servers. Intel will deliver four new processors for the category that span 45 watt high performance to sub-10 watt, all with server features including 64-bit, Intel® Virtualization Technology and Error-Correcting Code (ECC). Customers are already planning designs based on these processors, including Intel® Xeon® processors E3-1260L and E3-1220L in production now.

With a pdf fact sheet on the emerging micro server category.

 

SeaMicro ships 64-bit Atom Server, 1/4 power of Xeon

SeaMicro has a press release on its latest 64-bit Intel Atom Server.

image

SeaMicro Now Shipping the World’s Most Energy Efficient x86 Server with New 64-bit Intel Atom N570 Processor

The New SM10000-64™ Integrates 256 Intel® Atom™ Dual-core 1.66GHz Processors – 512 64-bit Cores and 850GHz, into a 10 Rack Unit System

A Hadoop benchmark was run that beat the performance of Xeon based servers with 1/4 the power.

For example, in the Hadoop MinuteSort benchmark test (http://sortbenchmark.org), 29 SeaMicro SM10000-64s were able to beat the performance of 1,406 dual socket quad core servers, but used just one-quarter of the power and took one-fifth the space.

Here is a Mozilla case study on using the SeaMicro box.

Mozilla compared performance on the SeaMicro
SM10000 with their incumbent system - an HP C7000
Dual Socket Quad Core L5530 Xeon Blade and found
SeaMicro to be dramatically superior on all of the
competitive dimensions: Capital expense per unit
compute, HTTP requests serviced per/Watt, and HTTP
requests serviced per Rack Unit. These advantages
combined to produce dramatic savings in both capital
expense and operating expense. On the operating
expense side, the SeaMicro SM10000 used less than
1/5 the power per request, and took less than 1/4 the
space of the HP C7000 for small transaction, high
volume workloads.

VentureBeat also covers the press announcement.

“The response has been extraordinary,” said Andrew Feldman (pictured at top), chief executive of SeaMicro. “The sucking sound in the market is unbelievable. Everybody wants low-power computing.”

Increasing Energy Efficient Server Competition, ARM efforts ramps up with Virtualization Support

James Hamilton has a good post on the state of ARM powered servers.  Sometimes when I read other people’s work I think what they say in the end should be moved to the beginning of the conversation.  Here is the last paragraph from James’s post.

We are on track for renewed competition in the server-side computing market segment and intense competition on power efficiency at the same time as internet-scale service operators are willing to run whatever processor is least expensive and most power efficient. With competition comes innovation and I see a good year coming.

James points out the ARM instruction set as an advantage.

ARM has become an incredibly important instruction set architecture powering smartphones, low-end network routers, printers, copiers, tablets, and other embedded applications. But things are changing, arm is now producing designs appropriate for server-side computing at the same time that power consumption is becoming a key measure of server-side computing cost. The ARM design team are masters of low power designs and generations of ARMs have focused on power management. ARM has an impressively efficiently design.

Here is another little known fact is Virtualization Extensions in the ARM architecture.

Virtualization Extensions

  • The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension and Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) enable the efficient implementation of virtual machine hypervisors for ARM architecture compliant processors.
  • Connected consumer devices and cloud computing demand energy efficient, high performance systems to handle complex software with potentially large amounts of data.
  • The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extensions provides the basis for ARM Architecture compliant processors to address the needs of both client and server devices for the partitioning and management of complex software environments into virtual machines.
  • The ARM Architecture Large Physical Address Extension provides the means for each of the software environments to efficiently utilize the available physical memory when handling large amounts of data.

Part of the Virtualization extensions is more than 32 bit virtual memory addressing.

  • As the complexity of software increases the requirement for multiple software environments to be available on the same physical processor increases simultaneously. Software applications that require separation for reasons of isolation, robustness or differing real-time characteristics need a virtual processor exhibiting the required functionality.
  • To provide virtual processors in an energy-efficient manner requires a combination of hardware acceleration and efficient software hypervisors. The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension standardizes the architecture for implementation of the hardware acceleration in ARM application processor cores, while high performance hypervisors from the world’s leading virtualization companies provide the software component upon which to build effective software combinations.
  • Cloud computing and other data or content oriented solutions increase the demands on the physical memory system from each virtual machine. The large physical address extensions provide a second level of MMU translation table so that each 32-bit virtual memory address can be mapped within a 40-bit physical memory range. This allows systems to allocate sufficient physical memory to each virtual machine for efficient throughput to be maintained when total demands on memory exceed the range of 32-bit addressing.

People will laugh at ARM servers, but when you can get a dozen or more for the price of one Xeon, there are scenarios where ARM servers will work.

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Nvidia announces Project Denver high performance ARM processor which includes Server Scenario

I’ve been discussing the idea of ARM servers for a couple of years and had early discussions with some folks with ARM on whether there was a scenario for ARM servers.

Today Nvidia announces an ARM processor targeting the server scenario.

NVIDIA Announces "Project Denver" to Build Custom CPU Cores Based on ARM Architecture, Targeting Personal Computers to Supercomputers


NVIDIA Licenses ARM Architecture to Build Next-Generation Processors That Add a CPU to the GPU

LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwire) -- 01/05/2011 -- CES 2011 -- NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM® based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.

Known under the internal codename "Project Denver," this initiative features an NVIDIA® CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU.

This new processor stems from a strategic partnership, also announced today, in which NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture. In addition, NVIDIA licensed ARM's current Cortex™-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra® mobile processors.

"ARM is the fastest-growing CPU architecture in history," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "This marks the beginning of the Internet Everywhere era, where every device provides instant access to the Internet, using advanced CPU cores and rich operating systems.

The mobile market is helping to drive energy efficient processors and this momentum is spilling over to the server market.  Within two years we should see ARM servers that are using a fraction of current servers.  Which is a big direction for greener data centers.

Why argue over a PUE change of 0.10 when you can drop your power use by 80%.

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With Windows 8 mobile/tablet on ARM can Server be around the corner?

There are rumors that Microsoft will announced Windows 8 at CES.

Windows 8 to introduce ARM; chip makers already on board

Todd Bishop on Tuesday, January 4, 2011, 8:51am PST

A demonstration of Windows running on ARM processors this week will double as the first public preview of Windows 8, the next major version of the operating system, and offer a glimpse of the new allies enlisted by Microsoft in a market defined thus far by Apple's iPad.

Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans confirm that the company tomorrow will show Windows running on the ARM architecture common in mobile devices and slate-style computers -- a landmark move intended to make the traditional PC operating system work on a broader array of machines.

Windows 8, it turns out, is the version that will introduce that capability. And Microsoft has lined up chip makers Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments to make ARM processors for Windows 8 systems.

But, in the same way that Intel Atom was announced for energy efficiency, how long can it be before Windows 8 Server runs on ARM for energy efficient computing?

Windows Server used to ship for MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha.  How hard is it to ARM for Server?

In addition, most of the various RISC-based computers designed to run Windows NT used versions of the ARC boot console to boot NT. Among these computers were:

  • MIPS R4000-based systems such as the MIPS Magnum workstation
  • all Alpha-based machines with a PCI bus designed prior to the end of support for Windows NT Alpha in September 1999 (the Alpha ARC firmware was also known as AlphaBIOS)
  • most Windows NT-capable PowerPC computers (such as the IBM RS/6000 40P).
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