Processador ARM for server

[Dark Kaeser]

Afinal esta Phytium é uma startup que veio de uma companhia estatal, a China Electronics Corp

It turns out Phytium is a startup inside the belly of a giant — China Electronics Corp., one of China’s oldest and largest state-run enterprises in the industry.
...
Since Phytium’s founding in 2012 in Guangzhou, a few processor designers have joined who have worked at well-known chip design companies in China including HiSilicon, Longsoon and Spreadtrum.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327572&page_number=1

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Entretanto com o lançamento do kernel 4.2 no Domingo

ARM64

• New processors: Hisilicon ARM64 SoCs (e.g. Hi6220)
• Various fixes for ARM64 for ACPI, MMU, SMP, perf, and more.
• Enabled EDAC on ARM64
• Support for Hikey board, ARM Juno r1 board

Read more: http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/09...ges-arm-and-mips-architectures/#ixzz3khZwCpMo

Isto aos poucos vai lá.

 

[Nemesis11]

Ainda falta muito para ARM ter uma tree única do kernel. Basicamente acho que a politica a tomar é aquela que a Red Hat vai fazer, que é lançar uma distro para ARM, mas só os que suportarem certas features e open standards.

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Há doidos para tudo, este tem estado a usar, ou a tentar pelo menos, uma Mustang como desktop

How to get Xserver running out of box on AArch64
http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2015/09/11/how-to-get-xserver-running-out-of-box-on-aarch64/


AArch64 desktop: day one

Moved Mustang mainboard into microatx tower case, added PCI Express riser with Radeon HD5450 graphics card in it. Then two hard drives (one for systems, second for testing installers) and fun started. Two monitors connected, speakers got some waves from cheap (1.5€) USB sound card, mouse and keyboard also migrated from my x86-64 desktop. I called resulting machine “desktopstein”.

http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2015/09/21/aarch64-desktop-day-one/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Xen now available in CentOS 7 for ARM64 servers

A little more than a week ago at Linaro Connect SFO15 in Burlingame Jim Perrin of the CentOS project publicly announced the availability of the Xen hypervisor in CentOS 7 for ARM64 (also known as aarch64). Jim and I have been working closely with George Dunlap, maintainer of Xen in CentOS for the x86 architecture, to produce high quality Xen binaries for 64-bit ARM servers. As a result you can setup an ARM64 virtualization host with just a couple of yum commands.

At Linaro Connect I went further by showing ready to use OpenStack packages for CentOS 7 aarch64. Thanks to Anthony Perard, who produced those rpms, setting up Nova with Xen on ARM64 is just a matter of installing the packages and starting Nova services. Jim promised to have the OpenStack rpms online at centos.org in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

https://blog.xenproject.org/2015/10/05/xen-in-centos-7-aarch64/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Já tinha sido previamente anunciado e não está para já disponível comercialmente.

Qualcomm enters server CPU market with 24-core ARM chip

Still, it's been working on the part for two years and demonstrated it Thursday running a version of Linux, with the KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC. The chip was running the LAMP stack -- Linux, the Apache Web server, MySQL, and PHP -- and OpenStack cloud software.

Chandrasekher was joined by the CEOs of Mellanox and Xilinx, who are working with it to build a complete server platform. Mellanox is designing network cards to work with the SOC, while Xilinx said it will build programmable chips to speed up particular workloads.

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...-server-cpu-market-with-24-core-arm-chip.html

Qualcomm Shows Off Prototype ARM Server Chip

Qualcomm is not disclosing the core design or other attributes of its 64-bit ARM server chip except to say that it hews to the ARMv8-A specification from ARM Holdings and that it has 24 cores. Qualcomm is not revealing what process technology it is using to make the prototype chip or any details on clock speeds, cache memory, main memory, on-chip controllers, and other features, and it is not talking about its code-name, either. What the company is saying is that it will deliver a production-grade ARM server chip using an advanced FinFET 3D transistor process that will have more cores than the pre-production chip showed off today.
...
“The chip we demonstrated today us based on Qualcomm purpose-built cores, they are not a licensed core,” Ravuri confirmed. “This is not based on the Snapdragon 820, these are server custom chips, and even the cores are server-specific cores, and are not mobile cores as the 820s are.”

http://www.theplatform.net/2015/10/08/qualcomm-shows-off-prototype-arm-server-chip/

 

[Nemesis11]

Muito interessante este processador da Qualcomm. Possivelmente o primeiro processador que vai fazer frente aos Xeons, em vez de combater só na entrada de gama.
Pena que poucos detalhes sejam conhecidos. Custom core, 24 cores, 64 bit.
A versão produção deve ter ainda mais cores.

 

[Dark Kaeser]

CERN CMS tests 64bit ARM Servers for worldwide grid scientific computing

David Abdurachmanov of Fermilab works in Geneva at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, testing all the latest different 64bit ARM Server platforms to measure when they may be recommended to be used by up to hundreds of computing centers around the world, potentially deployed to hundreds of thousands of servers to crunch large amounts of scientific data worldwide.

http://armdevices.net/2015/10/16/ce...vers-for-worldwide-grid-scientific-computing/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Applied Micro Circuits Corp (AMCC) announces X-Gene 3

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. announced its third-generation ARM-based server SoC, the X-Gene 3 running at up to 3 GHz and made in a 16nm TSMC process will sample late next year.

X-Gene 3 will pack 32 cores, 42 PCIe Gen 3 links and support eight DDR4 memory channels running at up to 2,667 MHz.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328249&page_number=1

Mike Robillard, a distinguished engineer at storage giant EMC said his company has been using ARM-based chips for a while. “We want a choice and we think [ARM has] an advantage in performance/Watt, performance/dollar and raw performance,” he said.

“X-Gene includes all the peripherals we need, so we can eliminate a lot of external components and save on power, board space and board layer count,” said Dave Preston, a distinguished technologist at HPE.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328249&page_number=2

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Para quem estiver interessado, estão disponíveis várias das sessões da Linaro Connect San Francisco 2015 (21 a 25 de Setembro)

http://connect.linaro.org/sfo15/

destaco esta relacionada com a problemática do UEFI, o link inclui o vídeo

SFO15-211: UEFI on ARM – Dealing with legacy & moving on
Speaker: Leif Lindholm
Date: September 22, 2015

This session will go through the problems caused by decisions made in the early days of UEFI on ARM, how they are still hurting us – in expanding our validation as well as by providing poor examples for porters to new platforms. But also about projects underway to resolve this legacy once and for all. We will also cover changes to Linaro’s platform infrastructure, as well as our increasing involvement with EDK2 maintainership.

http://connect.linaro.org/resource/sfo15/sfo15-211-uefi-on-arm-dealing-with-legacy-moving-on/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Qualcomm unveils $280 million joint venture with Chinese province

Qualcomm Inc and the provincial government of Guizhou in southwest China unveiled on Sunday a $280 million joint venture for the design, development and sale of advanced server technology, as the U.S. chipmaker deepens its Chinese relations.
...
Aberle said that in addition to its capital investment, Qualcomm was licensing its server technology to the joint venture, assisting with research and development and would supply expertise to implement the project.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-china-jointventure-idUSKCN0UV10A


Qualcomm teams up with Chinese province for server chips

"This server technology joint venture is a win-win scenario for Qualcomm and our Guizhou partner and will yield mutual benefits for both sides as we together pursue a very large data center opportunity in China," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior VP and GM of Qualcomm's datacenter group.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20160118PR203.html

 

[Nemesis11]

Voltando à Qualcomm. Parece que uma das empresas a testar o cpu para servidores, é a Google. E que se a performance for boa, vão utilizar e comprar o processador para usar em produção.

Beefy ARMs ... A rack of Qualcomm's in-development ARMv8 chips


3 Feb 2016 at 18:39, Chris Williams

Google is reportedly about to give a conditional thumbs up to Qualcomm's 64-bit ARM chips for servers.

San Diego-headquartered Qualy showed off prototype 24-core ARMv8 processors in October. At the time, Qualcomm's Anand Chandrasekher said the chips will try to balance "performance, acceptable power-compute density, and cost."

ARM cores are used in countless smartphones, tablets, gadgets, toys, hard drives, smartcards, networking gear, and so on, where electrical power is a premium and workloads are relatively light. Think small but nippy. Over in the data center – where Intel's beefy x86 chips rule supreme – it's a vastly different story: buckets of performance for lots and lots of watts to handle demanding workloads.

There is, though, the argument that the 64-bit ARM architecture could find a home in server warehouses: in densely packed racks running lots of light threads using RAM and network interfaces coupled closely to the cores, which may be ideal for web servers and apps.

Last month, Qualcomm – which mainly designs radio modem chipsets and ARM system-on-chips for smartphones – said it was about a year away from shipping server-grade processors at volume, although prototype parts are being sampled now by unnamed hyper-scale cloud providers in North America and China.

Now we know the identity of at least one of those hyper-scale cloud providers, and it's not that hard to guess: Google. The Mountain View-based web giant is said to be helping Qualcomm design its server-class ARMv8-a CPU, and will commit to using the silicon if its performance is good enough. That's according to a report by Jack Clark, formerly of these pastures, and Ian King at Bloomberg.

Google orders 300,000 processors a quarter for its acres of servers, and Qualcomm will want to catch a piece of that action. We can imagine Facebook, Baidu and Amazon AWS all sampling Qualcomm's wares at some level over the coming months, along with AMD's 64-bit ARM offering: the Opteron A1100 aka Seattle.

The big cloud players are always experimenting with new silicon: we've heard that Google uses customized Nvidia graphics processors in its deep-learning systems, and Amazon uses Intel CPUs tailored to its EC2 cloud.

Today's news may come as a nasty blow to AMD: Seattle, which was two years in the making, is powered by eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores, whereas the ARM world today is gearing up to use the superior A72. Qualcomm is using its own ARMv8-compatible microarchitecture in its server chipset.

A senior AMD x86 engineer told your humble hack early last year that Qualcomm was 10 years away from designing a decent data center-class processor. It may be sooner than that.

Meanwhile, Intel's x86 architecture accounts for 99 per cent of data center CPUs, and has the Xeon D family of chips ready and loaded to counter any incursion by the ARM architecture. ARMv8 has a long way to climb.

Ironically, Intel is hoping to get its radio modem technology into next-generation iPhones and other smartphones, edging Qualcomm out of that market while the latter is trying to slip into Intel's kingdom.

Spokespeople for Qualcomm and Google told The Register this morning in San Francisco: "We don't comment on rumor and speculation." AMD was not available for immediate comment.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/03/google_qualcomm_arm/

 

[miguelbazil]

Ou seja, está o palco montado, a Intel anda a sofrer muitos ataques em várias frentes. Seria interessante ver uma alternativa da Arm.

Eu não entendo, a malta da AMD é sempre assim tão boa a fazer previsões de mercado?

 

[Nemesis11]

Ou seja, está o palco montado, a Intel anda a sofrer muitos ataques em várias frentes. Seria interessante ver uma alternativa da Arm.

Eu não entendo, a malta da AMD é sempre assim tão boa a fazer previsões de mercado?

A Intel pode estar a sofrer vários ataques de vários lados, mas a quota de mercado da Intel em servidores está nos 99% o que é avassalador. Além disso, este cpu da Qualcomm ainda está a um ano de ser produzido em massa. O que existe neste momento são early samples em testes.

Ao mesmo tempo a Intel não está parada. A Intel tem duas armas para combater os Arm. Atom, no low end e Xeon-D no mid e high end.
O Xeon-D tem tido tanto sucesso, que até à pouco tempo era quase impossível comprar um produto no mercado aberto com Xeon-D. Isto porque as Googles e Amazons deste mundo apanharam quase a produção toda.

Por tudo isto, produtos Arm, mesmo no mercado servidor, ainda têm muito que correr.

 

[miguelbazil]

Sim, é um facto, eu vi os 99% e pensei "caramba, isto é um monopólio completo...", o que me deixa um bocado desconfortável sinceramente. De resto, é preciso alguma competição, e a intel anda a rebentar com tudo. A Arm pode ter muito pela frente, mas é uma boa perspectiva, e o suporte da google seria, no mínimo, valioso.
E acho que isto valida um bocado aquela ideia que eventualmente eles iam querer entrar nos mercados todos, portanto, ainda há uma esperança de eventualmente se virarem ao desktop de uma forma clara.

 

[Nemesis11]

Uma análise do processador ARM da Qualcomm para servidores:

http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/02/12/arm-servers-qualcomm-maps-out-datacenter-battle-plan/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

When it comes to ARM-based servers, Masters’ day job, “We have all the software pieces, it’s a matter of quality engineering and the out-of-box experience,” he said.

Specifically, current servers have some hardware glitches such as non-standard mobile PCI Express blocks in their SoCs or a few lines of tweaked code in their UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware. The anomalies prevent systems from running Linux without some fussy fiddling around — the kind of thing data center operators shouldn’t have to do. In that regard, “one of my goals is to make ARM servers boring,” he said.

“Take a look at what Qualcomm is doing with its developer system — they have a phenomenally good out-of-box experience,” Masters said.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328930&page_number=2

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Cavium ThunderX 64bit 48-core ARM Server enabling the 5G mobile future, next gen cloud/datacenter and NFV

http://armdevices.net/2016/02/24/ca...bile-future-next-gen-clouddatacenter-and-nfv/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

ENEA Pharos Lab, 64bit ARM server for Networking, world’s first OPNFV reference Lab

The following ARMv8 servers are used:
- Controller nodes: 3 * Applied Micro X-Gene 2 ARMv8-64 8 cores @ 2.4GHz, 32GB RAM, 1x128GB SSD, 2x1TB HDD, 1x10Gbps SFP+ NICs, 2x1Gbps NICs.

- Compute nodes: 2-3* Cavium Networks CN8890-CRB ThunderX ARMv8-64 48 cores @ 2.5GHz, 8x16GB RAM (128GB total), 1x500GB HDD, 1x40Gbps QSFP+ NIC, 2x10Gbps SFP+ NICs, 1x1Gpbs NIC (RJ45, IPMI interface).

no vídeo ele menciona que está a ser preparado também um sistema com o AMD.

http://armdevices.net/2016/03/02/en...-networking-worlds-first-opnfv-reference-lab/


Em relação à questão do "ovo e da galinha" do hardware/software tinha-me esquecido de postar este vídeo de elementos da 96boards

The team at Linaro with focus on 96boards are working to make it upstream friendly, better Quality Assurance, Validation, making the software more stable.

http://armdevices.net/2016/01/30/96boards-team-amit-kuceria-and-ricardo-salveti/

cerca dos 8:40 min do vídeo eles mostram o layout de uma board em cartão, que parece ser uma mITX, com portas SATA e segundo entendi uma interface PCi que permite usar uma GPU, embora não entenda qual é a board, os vídeos deste gajo têm coisas interessantes, mas ele devia deixar a parte da captação da imagem e som para quem sabe, ou pelo menos investir em algo melhor e aprender a usar

 

[Nemesis11]

Bons vídeos. A Cavium não é uma empresa nova no mundo das telecomunicações. É o seu principal mercado. O mais difícil é saltar para outros mercados. Mas já têm servidores de storage para se usar principalmente com Ceph, object storage distribuída.

O ultimo video da 96boards é interessante. Ainda há muito a fazer a nível de software. Andar-se a lançar uma build de um Sistema Operativo por board é uma loucura. Esse é apenas um exemplo, porque não há uma tree única do kernel de linux em Arm.

Mas é bom ver evolução.