back to article ARM servers look to have legs as OVH boots up Cavium cloud

Backers of ARM CPUs as a data centre disruptor capable of knocking Intel off its lucrative Xeon-powered perch have a new poster child in the form of hosting company OVH, which has announced it will stand up a cloud powered by Cavium's ThunderX chippery. The ThunderX is a serious bit of kit, as each can pack up to 48 cores each …

  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

    So much for Arm power efficiency when used in number crunching capacity I guess.

    I was expecting 2 x 160.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: 2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

      Well in terms of power consumption, it's 1x1600Watts. They're a redundant pair.

      Also there's 384 cores in this box, plus storage. That's significantly more cores than you'd have if you maxed out a 2U box with Xeons.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: 2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

        True, but you shouldn't be comparing with Xeon. These servers will excel if they can do more per U than Xeon, but only if the jobs don't need the x86 single-threaded oomph. Proxies, webservers, etc.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

          True, but you shouldn't be comparing with Xeon. These servers will excel if they can do more per U than Xeon, but only if the jobs don't need the x86 single-threaded oomph. Proxies, webservers, etc.

          It does indeed depend on what that single thread performance is for. Where ARM did very well in the mobile market was in working out what computing loads mobile users wanted to do then adding a specific co processor for it. That turned out to be media decompression and compression, good 3d performance, etc. Intel's approach is often to have a fast CPU and do it all in software. ARM won the mobile war easily.

          If the same thing happens in servers then Intel will be at a power disadvantage there too. Quite a lot of server loads are simply one of shoveling data around, so it's more about IO bandwidth, not CPU core grunt.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

      > So much for Arm power efficiency when used in number crunching capacity I guess.

      I believe chips themselves will only require around 15 W each, assuming I haven't confused this number with some other ARM-based platform I heard about at ISC. The 1600-watt part looks therefore like a truly enormous safety margin. This might be in part in order to account for all the possible storage devices - the particular Gigabyte server illustrating the article (and which if I understand the article correctly may not in fact be what OVH will end up using) may only have four storage bays per node but one of the ThunderX motherboards I have seen, I *think* a Gigabyte one as well, had sixteen SATA ports. Add all the RAM, fans et cetera and the total... is still nowhere 1.6 kW but at least a) is a much larger fraction thereof and b) the CPUs aren't the power-hungriest part of such a server.

  2. Phil Endecott

    I can't see anything on the OVH website, not even a press release. Any links anyone?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > I can't see anything on the OVH website

      Give them a bit more time - according to what I heard at ISC earlier on this week Cavium has not released pricing information for the chips yet so if even hardware vendors cannot say how much exactly their server boards will cost (although e.g. guys from Penguin Computing said they expect to make some announcements about ARM-based Open Compute boards next week), it is to be expected providers will hold off the specifics for now.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You could try http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460&utm_source=GIGABYTE+Press+Release&utm_campaign=110836cf6f-Cavium_Press_Release5_28_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a47e9f69ca-110836cf6f-62317781#ov

      From what I can find they should start to available in third quarter.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sacre diable! French ARM spammers in sight!

    OVH should really use these machines to track and kick out all the damned Frech spammers it hosts, but I'm afraid it will rent these to them...

  4. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

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