ARMy recruiting: NVIDIA’s Project Denver

ARM Ltd must be jumping with joy with the recent developments. Yesterday at CES, not only did Microsoft announce that Windows 8 will be coming to ARMs (pun intended), NVIDIA announced a continued partnership with ARM and “Project Denver“.

NVIDIA’s goal for the joint project is to be able to design new ARM-based processors for use in desktops, servers and hyper scale-out clustered supercomputers. While NVIDIA has had several setbacks with their Tegra and Tegra 2 processors (including D-Link’s switch from the latter to an Intel Atom processor in their Boxee Box device), the partnership will open up new doors for future generations of the Tegra processor. This would include access to the latest Cortex cores, which will not only provide additional performance and features, but can also keep power consumption at bay. Read the rest of this entry »

Found kissing in a tree: Windows 8 and ARM

One of the more intriguing announcements at this year’s CES is one from Microsoft: Windows 8 will add ARM to its supported architecture list. This is a very specific answer to the recent surge of ARM based devices and the lack of a proper answer to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Sure, Microsoft has Windows Phone 7, but that is more of a simultaneous step forward and step backwards from the already ARM-friendly Windows Mobile.

Microsoft will continue to push developers to use .NET even more now, as an application developed and compiled for the .NET Framework would be able to run on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, Itanium processors (although, Microsoft has recently stepped away from the architecture) and soon, ARM processors. Silverlight was one way Microsoft was able to extend the .NET Framework’s reach into ARM devices.

What would make me even more interested is if Microsoft will make an ARM release for the next major version of Windows Server that will be based on Windows 8. As I’ve written previously, I am excited with the prospects of low-power, hyper-scale out ready ARM-based servers. One of the limitations of going with an ARM-based server is the inability to deploy Windows Server and, therefore, applications developed against recent versions of the .NET Framework. Well, this might change in a couple of years, iff Microsoft is getting really serious about the ARM architecture.

If all this pans out, we can probably see Dell (or HP) releasing a next, next generation smart client with a dual (or quad) core ARM processor, 2-4GB of RAM and a moderate-sized SSD used to cache a read-only instance of Windows 8 that is streamed down by ARM-based Windows Servers. That would make for an efficient deployment for retail or financial environments. One can dream, yeah?

A Rack of ARMs: 16 cores in 1U

If you have been following my blog recently, you will probably have seen my advocacy of using servers with ARM processors in large scale-out environments due to their small form factor and very low power consumption. Both of which allows a single rack to host hundreds, if not thousands, of compute threads and increase application resilience; since, one or two downed nodes in a cluster of hundreds of nodes doesn’t have the same impact as one or two large virtualization hosts within a cluster of tens of nodes.

One new offering in the ARM server market is ZT System’s R1801e 1U rackmount chassis that houses eight nodes (or “System on Modules” in ZT-speak), one 80GB SSD per node, consolidated network by way of two integrated 4+1 Gigabit Ethernet switches, and is pre-loaded with Ubuntu Server. Each node has an ARM processor with dual Cortex-A9 cores, 1GB of DDR3 memory, 1GB of flash and the typical USB and SATA connections found in common systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Servers considered ARMed and dangerous

I have recently written that ARM-based processors are prime for debut in thin servers for large clouds serving up web applications. The combination of low power, small size and fully featured (some include network and PCIe controllers within the same die or package) makes it not only easier to integrate into small blades or compute modules, but also more economical.

Well, Marvell has announced a contender to the ARM-based server market: the Armada XP. As The Register reported, the processor contains four cores running at 1.6GHz, a DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, four PCIe x4 ports, four Gigabit Ethernet controllers, as well as additional connections for additional expansion. An interesting aspect of the processor is that the four cores can be ganged together and share a common pool of memory or the cores can run independently, each with its own segment of memory.

Although the processor would work great for many web application workloads, the processor can also be tasked for network applications, such as: firewalls, load balancers, VPN concentrator, network intrusion detection and/or prevention. Heck, if Cisco were to port their ASA code to run on ARM-based processors, I think we may have found a perfect replacement processor for the next line of security appliances. Another workload that the new Armada XP would compete very well in is the network-attached storage market, which Intel has also placed the Atom processor into. While the Armada XP cannot run Windows Storage Server, it can easily run various Linux distributions or various BSD operating systems with lower overhead and costs compared to a Windows Storage Server solution.

While it is not yet known how it will compare cost-wise with the Intel Atom processor, the fact the Armada XP has almost all of the features of a traditional northbridge, I/O hub and requisite network controllers included in the price and package might be enough to counter Intel’s discounting of the Atom processor. Then again, Intel would rather have people purchase servers with higher-margin Xeon processors with higher-margin I/O controllers and use virtualization. Granted, there are a lot of workloads that would do better on such higher-margin Xeon servers… for now.

A new look at cloud scale-out with ARM processors

With the rise of the smartphones and dependencies on web applications and the cloud, there has been one processor architecture that has taken the charge: ARM. Processors based on the ARM architecture have found their way into Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, Android smartphones and tablets, upcoming Chrome OS netbooks and tablets, home network routers and home multimedia hubs. Some of the reasons for the proliferation of ARM-based processors include: low cost, low-to-very-low power consumption, decent processing power, and open development environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Hardware Bytes: Sun UltraSPARC T2 Servers