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Servers with NEW mobile processors.
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Servers with NEW mobile processors.

skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

Would you be interested in renting a server like this?
Mobile processors can draw very little power thus creating a server with a mobile processor might be worth it. They might not be as powerful as their normal counterparts, but not everyone is using every resource on their dedicated server. Many people could do with an Intel Atom N2800, but this processor is becoming more obsolete daily. Mobile processors also create barely any heat, so you could really pack a lot of them into a blade server, thus reducing the colo cost even more. Also, those processors are way faster than Intel Atom N2800 and could easily handle NVME SSD PCI-e full speed.

What are your thoughts?

Thanked by 1mrTom

Comments

  • AlwaysSkintAlwaysSkint Member
    edited May 2021

    @skorupion said: What are your thoughts?

    Which sand pit have you had your head stuck in for the past few years?

  • You have @DataIdeas-Josh who sells RPIs with ARM chips that are comparable to what's found in phones, so I don't see a problem from the consumer end (at least I'd buy it).

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @AlwaysSkint said:

    @skorupion said: What are your thoughts?

    Which sand pit have you had your head stuck in for the past few years?

    Dude, I'm more classy than that.
    In a beach, not a god deam sandpit.

    @stevewatson301 said:
    You have @DataIdeas-Josh who sells RPIs with ARM chips that are comparable to what's found in phones, so I don't see a problem from the consumer end (at least I'd buy it).

    Yes, they are ARM and many apps aren't compatible with ARM. I mean a full-on x86-64 server

  • https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml
    .. and numerous others, including @Radi (IIRC)

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml
    .. and numerous others, including @Radi (IIRC)

    Please don't stop reading at the title of the post but all the way thru.

  • AlwaysSkintAlwaysSkint Member
    edited May 2021

    Ahh, not N2800: does Avoton count?

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    Ahh, not N2800: does Avoton count?

    1. Intel says its a server processor
    2. It's 7 years old.
  • Basically you mean laptop variants of cpu? There's also the "low power variants" meant for mini desktops. It does seem interesting, especially when you look at the 8/16 mobile ryzens which perform quite well at 15W.

    But it seems like these mobile cpus tend to be oem only.

  • ((skulks off into the Dunce's corner..))

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @smallbibi said:
    Basically you mean laptop variants of cpu? There's also the "low power variants" meant for mini desktops. It does seem interesting, especially when you look at the 8/16 mobile ryzens which perform quite well at 15W.

    But it seems like these mobile cpus tend to be oem only.

    They are OEM only, but that doesn't stop anyone from going to AMD or Intel and getting a batch of 1000

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    ((skulks off into the Dunce's corner..))

    HEY!
    Who allowed you to go to the dunce corner, stop undervaluing yourself.
    You are better than this!

    Thanked by 1AlwaysSkint
  • @skorupion said:

    @smallbibi said:
    Basically you mean laptop variants of cpu? There's also the "low power variants" meant for mini desktops. It does seem interesting, especially when you look at the 8/16 mobile ryzens which perform quite well at 15W.

    But it seems like these mobile cpus tend to be oem only.

    They are OEM only, but that doesn't stop anyone from going to AMD or Intel and getting a batch of 1000

    You would also need to get a bunch of motherboards too for the mobile cpus. Where would you buy them from? It would be too expensive for you to make your own.

    Maybe you could try to work with the low power cpus but it would require a lot of work nonetheless. If there was a big market for this someone would have done it already. The problem is mobo design is too expensive if you're not already in this business.

  • SpeedBusSpeedBus Member, Host Rep

    There was the Odroid H2+ which had a Intel J4115, but its been out of stock for a while now, https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/

    It does have some nice addons for it, for example,https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/h2-net-card/

  • @skorupion said:
    Would you be interested in renting a server like this?
    Mobile processors can draw very little power thus creating a server with a mobile processor might be worth it. They might not be as powerful as their normal counterparts, but not everyone is using every resource on their dedicated server. Many people could do with an Intel Atom N2800, but this processor is becoming more obsolete daily. Mobile processors also create barely any heat, so you could really pack a lot of them into a blade server, thus reducing the colo cost even more. Also, those processors are way faster than Intel Atom N2800 and could easily handle NVME SSD PCI-e full speed.

    What are your thoughts?

    I've seen a number of off-the-shelf firewall boxes aimed at small-to-medium offices with what (I think) are mobile versions of Intel chips. They tend to be SATA or mSATA in the drive connectivity department rather than NVMe but otherwise like what you are suggesting: significantly more capable than an N2800 and supporting more RAM than you find in cheap N2800 based boxes (I've not checked, but is the N2800 limited to 4Gb or is it just that no one ever bothered to give them chipsets/motherboards supporting more?).

    Those boxes make use of the lower CPU power draw in order to be passively cooled (often the whole top of the case is basically heatsink, relying on air circulation in the wider environment to distribute heat further (though for most firewall jobs the CPU won't be massively active except under DDoS like loads so that usually isn't much needed)). Perhaps those designs could provide a base to start from, being careful to note the potential for different heat output patterns (if the throttles are released and 24/7 video encoding happens you have more to deal with than from typical firewall loads).

  • deankdeank Member, Troll
    edited May 2021

    There was a period where Intel mobile CPUs were used for desktop. But that was before Atom came along after Intel sniffed the chance at low power computing.

    I, for one, had built a T2200 for Boinc a looooong time ago. Asus made such mobo for it. The trend went on as far as Intel core 3xxx era before dying off completely.

    There may be some industrial motherboard maker who may still do this but it won't be cheap.

    The main benefit of such a rig is that you do get a powerful rig when you need it but can draw ridiculously low power during general computing.

    I am talking about 10w for general power draw. 40w at full core load.

  • ^ Falls off couch at longest @deank post that I've ever seen..
    The end is nigh (tm).

  • AlwaysSkintAlwaysSkint Member
    edited May 2021

    BTW

    @skorupion said: Please don't stop reading..

    The thanks is due to the similarity to some of my not-too-numerous Support requests, where I find myself saying "Please stop skim reading my support question.." ;)

    Thanked by 1skorupion
  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    BTW

    @skorupion said: Please don't stop reading..

    The thanks is due to the similarity to some of my not-too-numerous Support requests, where I find myself saying "Please stop skim reading my support question.." ;)

    I LOLed irl

  • 0xOkami0xOkami Member

    Don't get this man wrong, it's actually not a bad plan for people who want do so some small things with a server. The CPU is decent (considering atoms lol) and if you can fit NVMe in it it can be capable of a webhosting server.

    Thanked by 2skorupion drunkendog
  • lanefulanefu Member

    Yes, they are ARM and many apps aren't compatible with ARM. I mean a full-on x86-64 server

    ARM in the server space isn't going away. Graviton2 performance is legit and so is Ampere's offerings. And rack density that can be achieved because of cooling and power consumption. The memory IO on those chips is also super great. And no bullshit hyperthreading. A cpu is always a real core and not just an extra pipeline

    The linux distros have all their packaging in place. Enterprise Java apps are turnkey on arm64. Cross compiling in golang is easy. Most apps in interpreted languages are fine as well.

    Now Microsoft and Google are working on their own datacenter chips. The hyperscalers are going to keep pushing to workloads to ARM.

    Id love to start seeing my server class ARM in the VPS and hosting providers.

    Thanked by 1bulbasaur
  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @lanefu said:

    Yes, they are ARM and many apps aren't compatible with ARM. I mean a full-on x86-64 server

    ARM in the server space isn't going away. Graviton2 performance is legit and so is Ampere's offerings. And rack density that can be achieved because of cooling and power consumption. The memory IO on those chips is also super great. And no bullshit hyperthreading. A cpu is always a real core and not just an extra pipeline

    The linux distros have all their packaging in place. Enterprise Java apps are turnkey on arm64. Cross compiling in golang is easy. Most apps in interpreted languages are fine as well.

    Now Microsoft and Google are working on their own datacenter chips. The hyperscalers are going to keep pushing to workloads to ARM.

    Id love to start seeing my server class ARM in the VPS and hosting providers.

    Yes ARM has its place in the future
    But sadly the future is not right now.

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep
    edited May 2021

    @0xOkami said:
    Don't get this man wrong, it's actually not a bad plan for people who want do so some small things with a server. The CPU is decent (considering atoms lol) and if you can fit NVMe in it it can be capable of a webhosting server.

    That's exactly what I mean. There are cheap 128 GB NVMe PCI-e drives, you could put in more slots and expand with memory as needed, and we will still have the data ports available for spinning old rust. So this could be a storage server and a normal server at the same time.

  • rcxbrcxb Member
    edited May 2021

    @smallbibi said:
    If there was a big market for this someone would have done it already.

    An economics professor was walking with a student across the university quad. "Look," says the student, pointing at the ground, "a $20 bill."
    "Don't be ridiculous," replies the rational professor. "If it were, somebody would have picked it up by now."

    I, like most others, prefer to simply locate most of my servers somewhere that electricity is very cheap. Find your nearest Alcoa smelter, and build a data center nearby.

    Only if you can't do that, is optimizing for power draw worthwhile. You'll have a difficult time finding enough mobile CPUs to fulfill demand, as well as mobile chip-sets for the boards, and the fewer units you can sell, the higher the price needs to be on each to cover development, and the higher prices compounds the problem with even fewer people interested in buying one.

    And you'll find performance is really quite disappointing, as those mobile chips sacrifice the huge on-die caches found in server (and other high-end) CPUs, which greatly improves performance on many processes. Further reducing sales.

    You can already get mini-PCs with a ultra low-power CPUs:
    https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-8259U-Beelink-256GB/dp/B08T657SM1
    https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Windows-i3-5005U-Processor-Ethernet/dp/B086145M8P/
    Perhaps you should just design a rack shelf that will accomodate a bunch of those...

  • v3ngv3ng Member, Patron Provider

    Small dedicated servers are quite interesting imo, they are probably not the best value option, but I prefer having dedicated hardware.

  • WilliamWilliam Member

    What you want is EPYC Embedded. But realistically a socketed CPU is going to be cheaper and you can get really low TDP variants (T suffix at Intel)

  • @skorupion said:
    Would you be interested in renting a server like this?
    Mobile processors can draw very little power thus creating a server with a mobile processor might be worth it. They might not be as powerful as their normal counterparts, but not everyone is using every resource on their dedicated server. Many people could do with an Intel Atom N2800, but this processor is becoming more obsolete daily. Mobile processors also create barely any heat, so you could really pack a lot of them into a blade server, thus reducing the colo cost even more. Also, those processors are way faster than Intel Atom N2800 and could easily handle NVME SSD PCI-e full speed.

    What are your thoughts?

    Mobile processors are designed for sleeping, like, a lot.

    Server processors are designed to be working, like, a lot.

  • pierrepierre Member
    edited May 2021

    @skorupion said:
    2. It's 7 years old.

    7 years for enterprise-grade hardware isn't anything. Almost all of the Xeon E5-v1 came out roughly 9-10 years ago and still runs fast.

    Hosts to this day are using it without any issues in their VPS lineups.

    Thanked by 1AlwaysSkint
  • @rcxb said:

    @smallbibi said:
    If there was a big market for this someone would have done it already.

    An economics professor was walking with a student across the university quad. "Look," says the student, pointing at the ground, "a $20 bill."
    "Don't be ridiculous," replies the rational professor. "If it were, somebody would have picked it up by now."

    I get your point, but all the mobo/oem manufacturers have not attempted to do this. During a time when all the big tech giants in the world are building more and more infrastructure worldwide, and with the industry being mature as it is, noone is attempting to do it. In such a situation, it's clear there's no market for this (perhaps due to the reasons you said yourself).

    If it was a novel idea in an immature industry that isn't the flavor of the decade then maybe your anecdote would be valid here.

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