Lately, Drew has become quite popular with the announcement that ARM is bringing their chips to the server market. In an arena that has been dominated by behemoths, Intel and AMD, it might surprise some to even think of an ARM processor in a server. But it is no surprise to technology experts working in web hosting, especially in data centers.

Power costs money. Energy consumption is an environmental and financial expense that many data centers are trying to significantly cut. As Drew explained,

“While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt”

ARM-powered servers will introduce boxes that are powerful enough to still perform well on the Web, while also reducing energy consumption and, as a result, cost. Drew says the ARM advancement into the server realm will not happen overnight. They will begin testing next year and expect to produce market-ready low-power server chips within the next three to five years.

Source: GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2010/07/29/arm-server-foray/
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

Intel is neither confirming nor denying the claims, meaning that they are probably true. Their last Xeon processor, the 7500 had eight cores, and it stands to reason that ten would be the next logical choice. In the past, they have jumped in higher increments (i.e. four cores to eight), but as the amount increases, it will be more difficult to fit more on a chip. Therefore, moving up two increments is still significant.

Xeon processors are popular in many hardware server lines, and it is common to see web hosting dedicated servers powered with two, four, or eight-core Xeon processors. Many run a 64-bit version of Linux, such as CentOS.

Source: Hardware Central
Photo: Flickr

Normally, low power consumption equates to low speed, which is fine for handheld devices but not for servers. Nevertheless, East argued that their multicore ARM processors are now “pushing up to 2GHz”. While this is still a far cry from the speed being delivered by current Intel and AMD server chips, it has potential.

At this point, there is no reason to suspect ARM will even have room to squeeze into the server processor market, even if their chips do start to come close to or match Intel and AMD performance. Still, many companies may have room for ARM-powered servers. Lowering energy consumption in data centers has become a concern, and ARM could offer an alternative, low-power solution.

Source: Tom’s Hardware
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The new chips are called Opteron SE and Opteron HE. There is no indication as to what the letters stand for, if anything. If they are following Intel’s lead, they are probably just random combinations. At any rate, AMD claims a 50 percent performance boost for the SE and 18 percent boost per watt for the HE.

Gina Longoria, AMD’s senior product manager for servers and workstations, said “demand has been really good” for the six-core Opterons and “higher than expectations.” Longoria added that AMD has won a few large deployments and many Opteron quad-core customers are upgrading to the six-core versions.

AMD hopes to target cloud computing and Web 2.0 server markets that are demanding more intense processing power in their web servers, while still maintaining lower energy consumption. Those wishing to add the new chips to their data centers can expect prices ranging from $455 for a two-socket HE to $2,649 for an eight-socket SE.

Source: ZDnet
Photo: Flickr

They will still sell Atom, Celeron and Pentium processors for netbooks, entry-level and basic consumption respectively. But for high-performance processors, particularly those used in servers, they will have the Core i3, Core i5 and the Core i7. An Intel blog explains:

“It is important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits.”

Thanks, Intel, that cleared it up so well for us, but it is still not clear what the numbers mean. I am assuming they are not moving to an odd number of cores (i.e. 3, 5 and 7 instead of 2, 4 and 8 cores), which makes one wonder how this is supposedly simplified from the “Core Duo” nomenclature. Only time will tell, and while it is sure to confuse desktop computer users who usually just take the word of salespeople and end up with supposedly high-powered Celerons, the web hosting providers will want to know exactly what they are getting and really do not care about cute lowercase letters.

Source: Intel
Photo: Flickr

The servers are design especially for light server loads, such as the type of load that would come with hosting websites. The servers will cost around $400, considerably less than the average server, and are part of an effort to reduce power and cooling costs in data centers. It will consume less than 30 watts, a small fraction of power consumption of most servers. Each case will contain up to 12 1.3GHz Nano U2250 based servers.

The XS11-VX8 will be capable of running 64-bit operating systems, which is perfectly suited for Linux -based web servers. Although such servers will not be in direct competition with servers running Intel and AMD processors, it might be tapping into a low-end market neglected by the high powered processor giants.

Source: The Inquirer
Photo: Wikipedia