Intel defends its data center territory vs. ARM with C2000 Atom

Intel announced last week the Intel ARM C2000 at 6W

The ARM processor was claimed to be more efficient.  And now the C2000 is 6x performance per watt

Barrons blog has a post on the business impact of the Intel Atom.  Here are the two analyst views.

Doug Freedman of RBC Capital Markets reiterated an Outperform rating and a $29 price target on the shares, writing, “INTC’s new Atom low-power C2000, successor to S1200, is a very compelling offering in that it not only offers up to 6x performance/ watt (vs. S1200), but will enable newer markets leveraging prior SoC efforts in mobile (smartphone/tablet).

Thus INTC stands to pick-up ground in new markets with attractive ROI on more customized solutions [...] Performance vs. select S1200 parts are expected to be up to 7x faster, offering up to 6x higher performance per watt. The product is expected to be a best-in-class solution vs. competitive ARM solutions in the marketplace [...] We were encouraged to hear that the gross margin impact is expected to be “a wash”. To us, this implies that the margins are at least comparable to performance-based parts, and potentially better due to 22nm and cost efficiencies realized as a result of leveraging mobile resources.”

From the bear camp, Hans Mosesmann of Raymond James, reiterating an Underperform rating, wrote that “Intel introduced today an impressive number of Atom-based processor, switch, memory, and optical connectivity products/technologies for the datacenter in a move that highlights, in our view, Intel’s sense of urgency to defend its server processor supremacy.”

It is hard to fathom Intel making this big of a splash had ARM not released its 64-bit v8 architecture (for licensing) nearly two years ago with the subsequent strong design interest. Intel was at pains to explain that microservers, as a category, are small but the opportunity for adjacent markets is big. Translation: we are worried about the ARM threat and are willing to cannibalize existing low-end, highly profitable XEONs to make sure this does not happen.”

What if ARM isn't more efficient than the other Server processors?

Wired has a post on why Google will embrace cell phone chips (aka ARM).

I've blogged on the concept of little green servers built on Atom and ARM, but what if ARM isn't more efficient than an x86 server?  Here are some thoughts that are running through my mind.

1. ARM is built on RISC which is more efficient
1. The ARM architecture describes a family of RISC-based computer processors designed and licensed by British company ARM Holdings.
2. Intel has not stood still and its processors are focused on efficiency and they have embraced the micro server category with the Intel Atom
1. 
2. And focuses a lot on migrating users from RISC to Intel. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/risc-migration/server-migration-transition-to-intel-based-solutions.html
3. Which would make you think Intel has focused on how it can outperform RISC when there is heavy IT loads.
3. Part of the ARM energy savings for mobile is the ability to shut down energy consumption during idle times.  But, if you have a highly utilized server with many VMs on it, when is the idle time?
4. IBM has shipped RISC server chips for years and it works for IBM well enough that there are no rumors of them to switch to ARM.
1. The POWER7 superscalar symmetric multiprocessor architecture was a substantial evolution from the POWER6 design, focusing more on power efficiency through multiple cores and simultaneous multithreading (SMT).^[6] The POWER6 architecture was built from the ground up for frequencies, at the cost of power efficiency and achieved a remarkable 5 GHz.
5. HP had PA-RISC.  Sun/Oracle has SPARC.

Intel's biggest margin business is its server processors and they will do anything to defend its market share.

The way some people write it is absolute that ARM's arrival will replace x86 servers.  What if they are wrong and x86 has a price performance that meets the market needs. Intel can survive longer than most of the ARM developers, except Samsung.  Samsung are the one guys who you don't want to under estimate.  Now if you think about Samsung being able to create new always-on servers for things like your home, media centers, cars, small offices, then that is different.  When you think of all the disconnected ARM processors in your home in your Routers is one example.  Should there be a better home server appliance that can connect your home devices.

ARM's potential in servers may be in new markets, not in the data center.

Saving Server RAM power using Mobile DRAM

Wired has an article on being more energy efficient in the data center using mobile DRAM.  What few people know is RAM is a top energy consumer in servers after the processors.  More than HD for many servers that are meant for memory intensive applications.

Over the past decade, the very concept of the server has evolved. Once, servers were giant machines jam-packed with processors and memory that focused on processing speed above all else. But nowadays, most servers are smaller and cheaper, and they consume less power. Services like Google Search and Microsoft Bing run on thousands of commodity machines, not the big beefy database servers hawked by companies like Oracle. When you’re serving millions of people across the globe, you can’t afford those power-hungry machines.

Here is the paper referenced in the wired article.

Did you hear that? It was the sound of Samsung shipping a Server, Homesync

Google is even getting scared by Samsung's growth in the Mobile market.

Google executives worry that Samsung has become so big—the South Korean company sells about 40% of the gadgets that use Google's Android software—that it could flex its muscle to renegotiate their arrangement and eat into Google's lucrative mobile-ad business, people familiar with the matter said.

Samsung's latest move is Homesync.

HomeSync will be available from April 2013 in select countries and continue to expand globally.

 Some companies took the move to use hundreds of Mac Minis as servers for a rendering environment. If you squint your eyes and look at the above specifications you can see the start of a server that could fit in a data center.  Throw out the HDMI and media chips.  Add more cores, memory and disk IO and you have a data center server.

 

We'll see what the price point is for Homesync.  Then you can extrapolate a price point for a Samsung server.

Baidu deploys ARM Servers

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham covers the deployment of ARM servers at Baidu.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is using ARM-based servers from Marvell making it the first company to depend on servers using the cell-phone chip in a production environment. Baidu is using the new ARM servers in its cloud storage application named Baidu Pan.

The area the servers used are for cloud storage.

Marvell’s release says the chip firm customized the ARM servers specifically for Baidu’s cloud storage requirements, taking the concept of server customizationcommon in webscale deployments to the chip level. Marvell says the platform is designed to increase the amount of storage for conventional 2U chassis up to 96 TB, and to lower the total cost of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server solutions. The end result should cut Baidu’s power in its data center by half according to the release.

I know my Drobo FS is powered by an ARM.

We'll see who next launches ARM servers.  I have a feeling this could be a regular occurrence.

Here is a picture from the Register.

Avi Liebermensch, manager of server products at the maker of ARM processors and other kinds of chips, tells El Reg that the Baidu server is based on the company's Armada XP MV78460. This is the same quad-core processor that Dell chose for its "Copper" ARM sled servers announced last May and purchased by unspecified customers of its Data Center Solutions bespoke server business unit. TheBaserock slab ARM server from Codethink also uses this Marvell processor as its main engine.

Baidu has deployed an ARM server for cheap and dense storage with local processing

Liebermensch was not at liberty to give a lot of details on the Baidu machines, and China is celebrating its New Year right now so people in Beijing are not around to answer calls. But Marvell did sneak us a picture and gave us some insight into the machine that Baidu has worked with Marvell and an unspecified ODM to create.