Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Marvell planning ARM Server 1/5 power vs. x86

EETimes has an article about Marvell's next ARM processers for Servers.

Marvell plans 40-nm ARM server processors
Partners include one working on port of Windows to ARM

Rick Merritt
EE Times
(05/10/2010 7:52 PM EDT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Marvell Technology Group Ltd. aims to supply silicon for ARM-based servers with 40-nm multicore processors it will ship this year. It is working with multiple partners including one that hopes to port a server version of Microsoft Windows to ARM.

"We have on the road map quad-core symmetric multiprocressing enterprise ARM-based SoCs that will be here soon," said Simon Milner, vice president of Marvell's enterprise group. "There's a huge opportunity here because the market is x86 dominated and ARM can bring power consumption breakthroughs into this space," he said.

The new chips will offer more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption compared to x86 processors that dominate the server market, Marvell claims. Earlier this year, Marvell announced its Armada 310 that runs at a gigahertz while consuming 700 milliW and will scale to 2 GHz at less than a Watt, Milner said.

And there are ARM servers even planned for Windows.

At least one partner is working on a port of a server version Microsoft Windows to ARM, and has access to some of the low level code needed for that job. "That is a large undertaking," said Milner.

Other partners are working on ports to ARM of x86 virtualization software also strategic for the server market. Some server customers are asking for 64-bit support, but "subsets of the server market can be addressed with 32 bits," Milner said.

For Marvell, the server initiative is one in a series of efforts since it acquired from Intel the XScale ARM design and an ARM architectural license.

"We have had significant success in the last five years taking ARM into new segments such as communications infrastructure and networking systems," he said.

ARM outperforms Atom in benchmark, watch for the business model for benchmark companies

Anyone who has been in the tech industry knows to take benchmarks statements “with a grain of salt.”  Linley group has a post on the ARM outmuscling the Atom processor.

ARM Outmuscles Atom on Benchmark

ARM—and, for that matter, MIPS—CPUs outperform Intel’s Atom, at least as measured by the CoreMark benchmark when normalized for frequency. ARM rates its Cortex-A9 at 2.9 CoreMark per MHz (CM/MHz), whereas Atom running a single instance of the benchmark achieves only 1.8 CM/MHz. In fact, all of the single-thread CPUs profiled in Table 1 outperform Atom in terms of per-clock performance.

Linley provides a table.

The business plug is to buy Linley’s report.  So, their motivation is to sell research, not to support research paid for by Intel, ARM, or a vendor.

In our latest report on CPU IP, we look further at the midrange and high-end CPU cores from ARM, MIPS, and others, including both household names and obscure companies, such as IBM and Beyond Semiconductor. The report compares not just performance but also die area, power consumption, and microarchitecture features. As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs. When combined with the latest DSP, video decoding, and graphics technology, these CPUs imbue consumer electronics and communications systems with capabilities far beyond what seemed conceivable a few years ago. --Joe

Joseph Byrne, senior analyst

The sentence above that gets people’s attention is this one.

As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs.

The competition that will be interesting us in the Data Center space is SeaMicro (Intel Atom) vs. Smooth-Stone (ARM).

As James Hamilton mentions in his blog.

Over the past year I’ve met with both Smooth Stone and SeaMicro frequently and it’s great to see more information about both available broadly. The very low power server trend is real and advancing quickly. When purchasing servers, it needs to be all about work done per dollar and work done per joule.

Are ARM Servers the disruptive change coming to Green the Data Center? Smooth-Stone is trying

GigaOm has a post on ARM taking on Intel in the Data Centers.

ARM Ready To Take On Intel in Servers

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 28, 2010, 3:15pm PDT 2 Comments

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ARM plc has confirmed that within the next 12 months its architecture, which is currently used primarily in cell phones and consumer electronics, will also be used in servers — pitting it against the lifeblood of Intel’s chip business. Speaking with EETimes, Warren East, the CEO of ARM, said servers using ARM-based chips should appear within the year.

The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM’s server ambitions. And it’s not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture. We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company’s eXtreme Computing group.

I blogged about this idea in May 19, 2009.

Energy efficiency is a new focus for many, and much to the  frustration of Intel, AMD, and Server OEMs, not everyone wants a multi-core high cost chip.

So, what’s next?

ARM based servers that can be even higher performance per watt.

Don’t know who has done this, but given the hardware ecosystem, there are people who have experimented with this and Linux OSs.  The popularity of ARM chips in mobile devices is where the knowledge exists for low power solutions.

Why not take a mobile device, an iPhone and turn it into a server.

GigaOm has a specific post about Smooth-Stone.

Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 9, 2010, 10:00am PDT 2 Comments

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Smooth-Stone CEO Barry Evans

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.”

However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans thinks yes, and I think the IP licensing company behind the architecture does too, because it appears to be cooking up something that involves using its architecture inside servers. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc, declined to talk to me for this story, saying the timing was not yet right to talk about the company and servers “for a few reasons that I can’t discuss.”

What is hilarious is while I was reading the GigaOm post about ARM taking on Intel, I am sitting in the car as a passenger next to Barry Evans sharing a ride from the airport, and had met three other Smooth-Stone executives that morning for breakfast thanks to a well connected data center insider.

What is Smooth-stone?

Founded in January 2008, Smooth‐Stone brings ultra‐low power mobile phone technology to the datacenter. Smooth-Stone has brought together leading engineers with experience in volume and blade server platforms, mainframes, server CPUs, networking processors, telecom infrastructure, and high performance cellular application processors and cell phone system-on-chips.  With depth in both hardware and software design and development the Smooth-Stone team is uniquely positioned to deliver a complete low power solution.

Smooth-Stone technology, combined with the industry-standard ARM architecture and tools, enables truly green datacenters.

Note the last sentence "enables truly green datacenters."

I did write a brief post about Smooth Stone in Oct 2009, but it was hard to find any other information.

Here is information in local papers. Austin Business Journal.

Smooth-Stone Inc., which is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and develops low power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment from the state with potential for $1 million in total investment for the commercialization of its technology.

“Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Perficient Inc. and chairman of the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.

Now that I know 4 executives from the Smooth Stone team and they know what I do besides write a blog you can expect I'll have more to say in the future about Smooth-stone as they are talking to the right companies and people who have a passion for greening the data center with a change in server hardware.

I had a great time talking to the executives at Smooth-Stone about ARM chip, data center industry, IT issues, energy efficiency, and our backgrounds.  I've been talking to some folks at ARM and other big data center users about the same ideas and our paths were crossing.  There is a perfect storm coming to data centers with a good chance ARM chips will be the power efficiency behind the change.  The environment and customers are going to be happy with the change, the current data center ecosystem will have to adapt fast once the change happens as it is not hard to crank out lots of ARM servers given ARM is the most popular processor now thanks to the mobile industry.

What can you do with an ARM Server, Demo of a Lego Rubik’s Solver

One of my highest Google search traffic hits is to Marvell’s plug computer 3.0.

Some may be thinking what would I do with an ARM based server in the home?

To get you thinking watch this video of a Nokia ARM powered mobile connected to a LEGO built Rubik’s cube solver.

Nokia’s Symbian has just gone open source, so maybe it’s not too far out to think your mobile and home server having the same code base.

Via’s Big Little Green Server: 64 bit, virtualization, low power

Slashgear has a post on Via’s home mini server.

VIA M’SERV S2100 home mini server arrives

By Chris Davies on Wednesday, Jan 13th 2010 1 Comment

 

One of the reasons we have a soft-spot for VIA is that they eat their own dogfood: not only do they produce processors, mainboards and other chipsets, they also put out a range of products (often to OEMs rather than end-users) that actually use them.  Latest is the VIA M’SERV S2100, a boxy little server intended for home and small business users that’s powered by the VIA Nano CPU.

The M’SERV S2100 measures in at 10.2-inches long and 4.7-inches high, yet can be stuffed with up to 4TB of storage space.  There’s also a 1.3+GHz VIA Nano CPU, two memory slots, two SATA bays and an internal Compact Flash socket which the S2100 can boot from.  As for ports, you’re looking at dual gigabit ethernet, three USB 2.0 and a VGA output.

The Via product page has more details.

VIA M’SERV S2100 is a data-oriented 64-bit Mini Server with a large storage capacity, low power consumption and strong network connection. The M’SERV comes equipped with two Gigabit Ethernet that makes this unique mini server system a perfect fit not only for home download applications, but also as a small business/SOHO/personal server that provides ample storage space in an energy-efficient, compact, low-noise system.

64-bit Processor
Powered by the VIA Nano 64-bit processor, the M’SERV S2100 mini server is the first and smallest server to support a 64-bit environment. The VIA Nano processor also features hardware assisted virtualization technology, enabling users to experience improved performance across multiple virtual environments.

CF Socket
Built-in bootable Compact Flash socket is perfect for installing a slimmed-down version Windows or other embedded OS.

Dual Gigabit LAN
Two high-speed Ethernet ports on a speedy PCI Express bus for both Internet and intranet connections.

Low Noise
A quiet ball-bearing fan silently cools the system with noise levels remaining below a mere 26.8 dB.

Two RAM Sockets
Dual onboard DDR2 SO-DIMM sockets for convenient system upgrades.

Low Power
Based on a VIA processor and chipset combination, the M’SERV S2100 is an energy-efficient system with remarkably low power consumption.

Marvell Plug Computer 3.0, Linux Microserver, ARM chip, WiFi, Bluetooth, HD – always on home server platform

Gizmodo.com has a post on Marvell Plug Computer 3.0.

Marvell Plug Computer 3.0: The Tiny Linux Brick

By Jesus Diaz, on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:59:25 –0

If I had $1,000,000 I would buy 10,000 of these Marvell Plug Computer 3.0, with a 2GHz Armada 300 CPU, Wi-Fi, and Linux 2.6, and build myself a supercomputer. It's either that or cocktails.

But, is this computer or what others would think of as a server?  A server defined by Wikipedia is any combination of hardware or software designed to provide services to clients.

Marvell Unveils Plug Computer 3.0 With Integrated Wireless and Built-in Hard Drive

Powerful Microserver is bolstered with 2 GHz ARMADA Processor to drive the "Always-On Lifestyle"

A cooler picture of a plug computer 3.0 is on CES cnet live.

Marvell super-upgrades its Plug Computer

by Dong Ngo

The Plug Computer 3.0

(Credit: Marvell)

It's been just half a year since the first plug computer, the SheevaPlug, or the Plug Computer 1.0, was introduced, but Marvell is now ready to release the third generation of the product.

The company announced Tuesday at CES 2010 the Plug Computer 3.0, which it believes to be such an upgrade over the first one that it decided to designate it as the third (3.0) generation of the product, even though it's really the second.

The naming aside, the Plug Computer 3.0 seems indeed impressive. Sleek-looking and smaller than a deck of playing cards, the new mini computer is now much more powerful than the first generation. It's equipped with Marvell's brand-new ARMADA 300 processor, running at 2.0Ghz (as opposed to only 1.2Ghz of the Marvell Kirkwood processor that powers the SheevaPlug).

The new processor is also designed to use less energy and at the same time has better support for plug and play and streaming media. The Plug Computer 3.0 also offers many more options than the previous generation, including built-in storage and support for wireless networking and Bluetooth. And like the previous generation, it also has a built-in USB port and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The machine supports multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions, making it a great platform for application development.

Intel’s Microserver – 25 watts at idle

Intel has been attention for the market needs for low power servers – little green servers. CNet news writes on a new ‘microserver’ standard Intel is proposing.

Intel seeks new 'microserver' standard

by Stephen Shankland

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SAN FRANCISCO--In September, Intel introduced its back-to-the-future idea of tiny "microservers." Now the company wants to make the design into a standard others can use, too.

The chipmaker will offer its design specification to the Server System Infrastructure Forum by the end of the year, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel's high-density computing group. If the group's board votes its approval for the specification, group members may use the designs royalty-free, he said in a meeting with reporters here.

"Before the end of the year, it will happen," Waxman said.

An Intel 'microserver'

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The computer industry is in constant tension between proprietary designs and standards that anyone may use. The former can mean tidy profits for companies, as long as the technology is widely adopted, but the latter can spur broader adoption. Intel's primary business, selling processors, benefits more from the latter when it comes to cultivating a new server market segment.

What is inside the Intel’s offering?

What's inside?
The diminutive server consists of a single quad-core processor and four memory banks. Intel showed 16 microservers housed in an 8.75-inch-tall chassis that supplies them all with power, cooling, and a network connection to the outside world. Along the bottom of the chassis is a bay with 16 "sleds" that each has a trio of 2.5-inch hard drives that directly connect to each microserver.

The present microserver uses a 1.86GHz quad-core processor, the "Lynnfield" model of Intel's new "Nehalem" generation. Its top power consumption is 45 watts, but early in 2010, Intel will release a dual-core "Clarkdale" model that consumes only 30 watts when running flat-out.

That's at the top end, though. Intel's goal is for the entire microserver--which also includes memory and supporting chips--to idle at just 25 watts of power.

An interesting part not discussed is how much is the microserver?

OpenSolaris Green Home Server – low power and small

Sun employee Constantin Gonzalez Schmitz has post on his technical decisions for a Green OpenSolaris Home server. His requirements for ECC memory and power efficient make sense to have a reliable low power server.

A Small and Energy-Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server

In an earlier entry, I outlined my most important requirements for an optimal OpenSolaris Home Server. It should:

1. Run OpenSolaris in order to fully leverage ZFS,
2. Support ECC memory, so data is protected at all times,
3. Be power-efficient, to help the environment and control costs,
4. Use a moderate amount of space and be quiet, for some extra WAF points.

He admits his wife works for AMD, but qualifies his decision for AMD processor based on price, performance, and energy efficiency.

Disclosure: My wife works for AMD, so I may be slightly biased. But I think the following points are still very valid.

…

AMD on the other hand has a number of attractive points for the home server builder:

• AMD consumer CPUs use the same microarchitecture than their professional CPUs (currently, it's the K10 design). They only vary by number of cores, cache size, number of HT channels, TDP and frequency, which are all results of the manufacturing process. All other microarchitecture features are the same. When using an AMD consumer CPU, you essentially get a "smaller brother" of their high end CPUs.
• This means you'll also get a built-in memory-controller that supports ECC.
• This also means less chips to build a system (no Northbridge needed) and thus lower power-consumption.
• AMD has been using the HyperTransport Interconnect for quite a while now. This is a fast, scaleable interconnect technology that has been on the market for quite a while so chipsets are widely available, proven and low-cost.

So it was no suprise that even low-cost AMD motherboards at EUR 60 or below are perfectly capable of supporting ECC memory which gives you an important server feature at economic cost.

My platform conclusion: Due to ECC support, low power consumption and good HyperTransport performance at low cost, AMD is an excellent platform for building a home server.

To keep things small he uses 2.5” drives.

While looking for alternatives, I found a nice solution: The Scythe Slot Rafter fits into an unused PCI slot (taking up the breadth of two) and provides space for mounting four 2.5" disks at just EUR 5. These disks are cheap, good enough and I had an unused one lying around anyway, so that was a perfect solution for me.

And, being concerned about reliability adds a 2nd NIC.

Extra NIC: The Asus M3A78-CM comes with a Realtek NIC and some people complained about driver issues with OpenSolaris. So I followed the advice on the aforementioned Email thread and bought an Intel NIC which is well supported, just in case.

Constantin was able to achieve a 45W idle power consumption.

The Result

And now for the most important part: How much power does the system consume? I did some testing with one boot disk and 4GB of ECC RAM and measured about 45W idle. While stressing CPU cores, RAM and the disk with multiple instances of sysbench, I could not get the system to consume more than 80W. All in all, I'm very pleased with the numbers, which are about half of what my old system used to consume. I didn't do any detailed performance tests yet, but I can say that the system feels very responsive and compile runs just rush along the screen. CPU temperature won't go beyond the low 50Cs on a hot day, despite using the lowest fan speed, so cooling seems to work well, too.

It will be interesting to see what follow up posts Constantin writes.

Google, Intel, Netapp fund Wimpy Node/Server Research

News.com has an article on low power servers/nodes which is funded by Google, Intel, and Netapp.

Researchers tout 'wimpy nodes' for Net computing

by Stephen Shankland

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Mainstream servers are growing increasingly brawny with multicore processors and tremendous memory capacity, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh think 98-pound weaklings of the computing world might be better suited for many of the jobs on the Internet today.

This first-generation FAWN system has an array of boards, each with its own processor, flash memory card, and network connection.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

The alternative the researchers advocate is named FAWN, short for Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes. It's described in a paper just presented at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.

In short, the researchers believe some work can be managed with lower expense and lower power consumption using a cluster of servers built with lower-end processors and flash memory than with a general-purpose server. And these days, with green technology in vogue and power costs no longer an afterthought, efficient computing is a big deal.

"We were looking at efficiency at sub-maximum load. We realized the same techniques could serve high loads more efficiently as well," said David Andersen, the Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of computer science who helped lead the project.

It's not just academic work. Google, Intel, and NetApp are helping to fund the project, and the researchers are talking to Facebook, too. "We want to understand their challenges," Andersen said.

What scenarios are they looking at?

The FAWN approach can be adjusted with hard drives or conventional memory to match various sizes of datasets or rates or the queries retrieving that data.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon et al.)

The key value of FAWN
So where exactly is FAWN useful? Andersen makes no claims that it's good for everything--but the use cases are often central to companies at the center of the ongoing Internet revolution.

Specifically, it's good for situations where companies must store a lot of smaller tidbits of information that's read from the storage system much more often than it's written. Often this data is stored in a form called "key-value pairs." These consist of an indexing key and some associated data: "The key might be 'Dave Andersen update 10,579.' The update value might be 'Back in Pittsburgh.'"

How much power can they save?  52 queries per joule for typical server vs. 346 queris per joule for FAWN.

The researchers compared how many datastore queries could be accomplished per unit of energy and found FAWN compelling: a conventional server with a quad-core Intel Q6700 processor, 2GB of memory, and an Mtron Mobi solid-state drive measured 52 queries per joule of energy compared to 346 for a FAWN cluster. And tests of a newer design show even more promise: "Our preliminary experience using Intel Atom-based systems paired with SATA-based Flash drives shows that they can provide over 1,000 queries per Joule," the paper said.

NYtimes - Atom and ARM server companies

NYTtimes has a blog post on lower power mobile chips being used in Servers.

October 6, 2009, 5:00 PM

Servers With Cellphone Chips? Yep, Here They Come

By ASHLEE VANCE

If a server runs on a smartphone chip is it still a server?

The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which all battle energy costs on a huge scale.

The Intel Atom based company is SeaMicro.

SeaMicro, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has put together a server based onIntel’s Atom chip, which currently slots into things like netbooks and other mobile computing devices. Intel expects Atom to drive its cell phone strategy in the coming years as well.

Exact details on the SeaMicro product have been tough to come by, since the company remains inside the cone of silence, but people familiar with SeaMicro’s hardware say it will pack about 80 Atom chips in a very small chassis. The company also has some proprietary hardware and software twists, these people said.

SeaMicro is in silence mode, but here is nugget from their web site.

At SeaMicro we believe data centers can be vastly more power efficient than they are today. To this end, we have tremendous customer support and outstanding Venture Capital backing. Our staff is comprised of experts with decades of experience and we are always looking for exceptional people who can add to our strength.

SeaMicro is a rapidly growing technology pioneer so you will wear many hats and have opportunity to grow. We believe that working for SeaMicro will be the most exciting and challenging chapter of your career.

The ARM based company is Smooth-Stone.

In Austin, Texas, there lurks another start-up called Smooth-Stone. According to people familiar with its plans, Smooth-Stone is working on a chip using the ARM architecture that will go into servers. ARM chips from companies like Samsung and Qualcomm typically make their way into phones like the iPhone.

Barry Evans, the chief executive of Smooth-Stone, did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Mr. Evans worked at Intel for many years in the company’s communications and mobile products groups.

Here is information in local papers. Austin Business Journal.

Smooth-Stone Inc., which is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and develops low power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment from the state with potential for $1 million in total investment for the commercialization of its technology.

“Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Perficient Inc. and chairman of the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.

Barry Evans, CEO of Smooth-Stone, said the server market is catching on to what the mobile phone market has known for nearly 20 years.

“Power consumption matters,” Evans said. “Moore’s law delivers amazing gains in server compute performance, but power and cooling challenges are now front and center. Smooth-Stone is bringing low-power mobile phone technology to servers. We are proud to partner with the Austin Chamber of Commerce, the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization, the state of Texas and the Austin Technology Incubator to lead the push for truly green datacenters.”

Data centers use large amounts of electricity, which some technology experts say is becoming a problem.

“There is a tremendous amount of improvement potential in reducing data center power consumption,” said Ian Ferguson, director of Segment Marketing with ARM, a company working with Smooth-Stone on low power technology.