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back to article AMD tries to kickstart ARM-for-servers ecosystem

AMD today rolled the dice on a risky proposition: enthusiasm for ARM-powered servers in the data center. The announcement fleshes out what the vendor outlined last June. It's an idea that looks high-risk from several angles: the number of server vendors in the word has just shrunk again with Big Blue exiting the x86 server …

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  1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    VMware CEO ...

    Vendor of a product that is necessary to share the cost/power/heat of x86 across different installs talks down a cheap low power server alternative.

    In other news, Microsoft claims that Unix will never catch on in the data center and recommends Windows8

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    1. Gordan
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      Re: VMware CEO ...

      "VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger last year opined that x86 would still the be the data centre's CPU of choice even if ARM silicon consumed no electricity whatsoever."

      The key point to me is that this is coming from the CEO of a company that doesn't have a port of any of their products for ARM. Of course he would say that - he doesn't want to have to invest a fortune into porting their product.

      Xen, OTOH, already has an ARM port, and the thinner virtualization methods sush as VServer already run on ARM.

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      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
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        Re: VMware CEO ...

        And since you are going to be running Linux on ARM anyway there are a dozen different ways of having multiple "server" on one machine in Linux without the crude VMWare approach of full visualization or nothing

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  2. Charles Manning

    Not just power consumption

    Hardware flexibility is really important too.

    Intel don't allow you to design chips. You have to take what Intel decides to bake.

    With ARM **you** can customise the chips **you** want.

    For networking/servers this might be muli-core parts with networking fabric, automatic switchover,... buitlt in. For crypto crunching it might be chips with huge crypto engines built in. For movie makers it might be chips with lots of video heavy-lifting done in hardware.

    All these things do lead to power saving, but they also lead to reduced systems costs. All very important in doing more.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would make a nice filer

    With 8 SATA ports and room for a pair of RAID controllers you could probably make the Dev kit into a decent NAS.

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    1. P. Lee
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      Re: Would make a nice filer

      Want to revitalise the desktop market? NAS server on a PCIe16 card with its own power supply. Then bridge twin Gig-E ports on the back of the card with a virtual NIC interface the host can use over PCIEx16.

      Even gamers rarely need more than one graphics card and we've had several generations of mostly wasted extra PCIEx16 slots.

      Add ARM to a graphics card and you could put android on the desktop without powering up the main computer. Not as handy as a tablet, but fine for always-on browser/email/twitface. No need for all that uber-3d stuff to be powered up, just a nice silent computer that does communication.

      I really don't understand why manufacturers don't do more with their hardware. Surely those useless desktop touchscreens are just begging to be telephones too!

      I know, the topic was servers, but unless you've got big.LITTLE for x86, I suspect it will be a hard sell. FLOSS shops can benefit, but licensed software is likely to be a no-go. Asterisk on ARM? Maybe - lower latency, cheaper farms, something like that.

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    2. Woodnag
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      Re: Would make a nice filer

      10 SATA please. That's 2x 5 disk ZFS RAIDs.

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      1. Bronek Kozicki
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        Re: Would make a nice filer

        Speaking of filers ... where do I send the money so they can finally get btrfs out of "experimental" ? Or what is the best way to run ZFS in a Xen or other VM (with its high RAM memory impact)?

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AMD expanding their product line

    AMD has a lot of good engineering expertise that they can use to develop custom hardware for other companies as they have done with the PS, Xbox and Wii consoles. Offering custom ARM products makes perfect sense and it should me a good revenue stream for AMD.

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  5. Christian Berger

    They'd first need to sort out the common platform problem

    They need to find ways to make all hardware look similar enough for the operating system to be able to boot across multiple vendors without having to port it.

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    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      Re: They'd first need to sort out the common platform problem

      Don't you think that AMD is in a good position to do just that? Unlike, say Calxeda, it has all the necessary resources for the full-stack.

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    2. Paul J Turner
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      Re: They'd first need to sort out the common platform problem

      Apparently that is well in hand! :-)

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/29/arm_standardization_sbsa/

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  6. Torben Mogensen

    Software

    Unlike PC software, a lot of server software are written portably, at least across multiple versions of Unix/Linux. This is partly because the server landscape already supports several processor architectures: x86, x64, Sparc, and even Itanium, but also because server software doesn't use machine-specific GUI APIs. So it is relatively painless to port server software from one Unix/Linux/BSD platform to another. There may be differences in how compilers handle corner cases (due to the woefully underspecified C standard) and implicit assumptions about byte order and how unaligned access is handled, but it is still a lot easier than, say, porting Windows software to Linux or MacOS.

    So, while software pretty much locked desktop users to the Windows/x86 platform, there has never been quite the same adscription to a single platform in the server world.

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    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      Re: Software

      Yes, but Christian's point about low-level stuff, ie. booting and drivers is still a challenge for ARM stuff.

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  7. CAPS LOCK

    This is fantastic news...

    ... Expect cheap(er) Xeons any time soon in an attempt to kill this at birth.

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  8. /dev/null
    WTF?

    Huh?

    AMD have just announced a chip based on a completely new (to them) architecture, and they called it... Opteron???

    I'll never understand marketing people...

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    1. SoaG
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      Re: Huh?

      Marketing people?

      They're usually the ones who want to throw away an established, recognized name/logo for no better reason than a vain attempt to justify their own existence.

      This looks like a rare case where the grossly overinflated egos of the marketing people were overruled by someone not in marketing with some actual business sense.

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  9. talk_is_cheap

    The key thing missing from this report.

    One key market changer with this chip seems to be the amount of memory that it can directly address. At 128GBytes this is way above entry level Xeons (32GBytes) or new new Atom processors (64GBytes).

    Intel may not lose sales, but they may have to reduce their margins a lot.

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  10. Paul J Turner

    Short memory Pat?

    "Gelsinger feels that the ecosystem that has grown up around x86 gives the architecture such a head start that it would be impossibly expensive to replicate, even if anyone had the incentive to do so"

    I bet that Mac developers on 68000 thought they were entrenched and safe, and Mac developers on Power PC after them. Wake up mate, porting isn't that hard these days and customers will take a little short-term pain for long-term gain. Sometimes twice.

    I realise that 'ecosystem' includes hardware, but that's mostly soon solved (solved first in fact, obviously) and becomes a guide for others. The vast majority of moving processors is in the software.

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  11. Hans 1

    AMD have the facilities, the expertise, and the customer based to pull this off.

    I think they name the chip Opteron because that was the last thing that beat Intel, back in the day ... and had Intel shift paradigm completely.

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