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Qualcomm enters server CPU market with 24-core ARM chip | Supports KVM hypervisor
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Qualcomm enters server CPU market with 24-core ARM chip | Supports KVM hypervisor

DerekDerek Member
edited October 2015 in General

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2990868/qualcomm-enters-server-cpu-market-with-24-core-arm-chip.html

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3o8hq9/qualcomm_enters_server_cpu_market_with_24core_arm/

Qualcomm has revealed its plans to enter the server CPU market with a custom processor based on a design from U.K. chip company ARM.

Qualcomm becomes the latest vendor to build a server chip using the ARM architecture, which is widely used in smartphones and tablets. Some believe ARM can challenge x86 in the data center because of its low-power characteristics.

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It's aiming the chip at hyper-scale customers such as Facebook and Google, as well as service providers and large enterprises. It says the chip will be suitable for cloud workloads including big-data mining, machine learning, and Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service offerings.

Thanked by 1Maounique

Comments

  • blackblack Member
    edited October 2015

    That's how AMD tried to market their chips to DCs, look how that turned out. It might be cool as a personal server at best but most companies won't go for it, especially since everything is moving to "the cloud".

  • singsingsingsing Member
    edited October 2015

    Intel has fairly solid low-power, hard to see the advantages. I'm assuming they didn't get all 24 cores on full load running on a few watts total.

  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    Pretty interesting potential product.

    Thanked by 1inthecloudblog
  • Would like to see how it compares to 8x xeon e7 8890 v3 rotfl

  • inthecloudblog said: Would like to see how it compares to 8x xeon e7 8890 v3

    Pricewise?

  • @singsing said:

    Let's say a bank : they couldn't care less about price. They want power.

  • Very promising.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2015

    when you want small factor, 20 blades in 1U, you cant go even with atom. Each can have new flash soldered on and can be started when needed, the cloud will do the rest.
    It is a very good concept, arm support is growing in the *nix world, the banks can keep their windows servers, who cares about their money anyway...

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    inthecloudblog said: Let's say a bank : they couldn't care less about price. They want power.

    And they won't want this, which lacks power.

    A rack full of mobile phone chips. No thanks.

  • $7

    Thanked by 2sijie123 MikePT
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2015

    raindog308 said: And they won't want this, which lacks power.

    A rack full of mobile phone chips. No thanks.

    For the same performance as a haswell, arm uses at most 50 percent of power, some reports mention 33 or even 25% if we are to believe ARM, with that economy of TDP you can stack way more of those chips in an 1U, each with a bit of NAND storage in specially designed boards, it may cost less too, and the power and space taken will certainly make up for it if the price is even higher, but it is not.
    If you want parallel computing at a huge scale, ARM is increasingly the better choice.

  • @Maounique said:
    If you want parallel computing at a huge scale, ARM is increasingly the better choice.

    Is there any benchmark for these processors, to compare with Intel or AMD? You were comparing performance, that's why I asked.

    BTW, when is iwStack gonna introduce ARM based server? :D

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    emdad said: BTW, when is iwStack gonna introduce ARM based server? :D

    No plans, we do not need huge CPU, the servers stay below 30%, the bottlenecks were with the storage clvm did not like thousands of small volumes.

    emdad said: Is there any benchmark for these processors, to compare with Intel or AMD? You were comparing performance, that's why I asked.

    The comparison is for Intel, nobody really takes AMD seriously in the server market, we had a big 4 cpu 32 cores server between the ones which started selling VPSes for the masses, but it was sent to another job.
    Look at ARM charts, they say 75%, I say at least 50% power savings for same computing muscle.

    Thanked by 1emdad
  • Qualcomm still has an edge on power efficiency in low power devices but we'll have to see if they can get enough edge in efficiency to justify using them. Huge companies that run their own server farms and clouds could benefit from lower power consumption for sure.

  • @Maounique said:
    Look at ARM charts, they say 75%, I say at least 50% power savings for same computing muscle.

    Do you think these ARM Processors would be suitable for GameServer Hosting at some point?

  • singsingsingsing Member
    edited October 2015

    Maounique said: 25% if we are to believe ARM

    But there's no reason to. ARM reports those figures using benchmarks favorable to ARM.

    Also, for 24 cores, memory contention may be a problem for a lot of workloads. Then you're just wasting watts keeping all those cores idle while they wait for their turn on the bus.

    Let's face it, a 24-core ARM chip is bound to be ultra-niche. It might outperform Intel on power consumption for workloads that fit into that niche, but not in general.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2015

    it will outperform for the purpose they were designed to, this is the beauty of ARM licensing model, you can design chips for a specific task, while on intel you have to use power for all that extra bloat you dont need, like memory controller, even video controller in places, if ARM designs chips for supercomputers or their licensees, they will clearly outperform intel in terms of power, which will lead to bigger density and less cooling, cheaper and faster machines.
    It will obviously not be fit for a gaming rig, not even for a phone, but will do it's task.

    JustRefleX said: Do you think these ARM Processors would be suitable for GameServer Hosting at some point?

    Quote

    They should be available now, just the binaries must be compiled for ARM and nobody does that, perhaps for open source games.

  • @Maounique said:
    it will outperform for the purpose they were designed to, this is the beauty of ARM licensing model, you can design chips for a specific task, while on intel you have to use power for all that extra bloat you dont need, like memory controller, even video controller in places, if ARM designs chips for supercomputers or their licensees, they will clearly outperform intel in terms of power, which will lead to bigger density and less cooling, cheaper and faster machines.
    It will obviously not be fit for a gaming rig, not even for a phone, but will do it's task.

    They should be available now, just the binaries must be compiled for ARM and nobody does that, perhaps for open source games.

    So CSGO might be a possibility at some point? When there is support for it obv

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    It should be possible now, a programmer familiar with the code might do it, there are automated tools, but that is complicated code, will not work that way, I think.

  • Valve has not yet made it's way onto ARM devices and mobile device with games. They only have that Steam client for Android/iOS and such. No games though. They are however pushing Linux development for Steam and their own games.

    Even ultra old games like Half-Life are available on Linux now. Of course also new games like CSGO.

    I don't think that Valve will go the ARM way anytime soon.

  • @Hidden_Refuge @Maounique

    Is there any way to make csgoservers work on ARM Machines without huge performance loss?

  • There are no native binaries so only virtualization helps. KVM maybe for ARM.

  • @Hidden_Refuge said:
    There are no native binaries so only virtualization helps. KVM maybe for ARM.

    Linux Debian? I'd use Scaleway btw. 4 Dedicated Cores, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD

  • @JustRefleX said:
    Linux Debian? I'd use Scaleway btw. 4 Dedicated Cores, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD

    The OS doesn't matter much. You can install KVM on Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu and etc. The most important for CSGO is a x86 CPU architecture environment. This is what ARM can't provide because it's simply ARM CPU architecture. So here you need virtualization to emulate a x86 CPU.

  • @Hidden_Refuge said:
    The OS doesn't matter much. You can install KVM on Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu and etc. The most important for CSGO is a x86 CPU architecture environment. This is what ARM can't provide because it's simply ARM CPU architecture. So here you need virtualization to emulate a x86 CPU.

    Hmm. If I emulate x86, will it have a huge impact on the performance per cpu or a small one?

  • @JustRefleX said:
    Hmm. If I emulate x86, will it have a huge impact on the performance per cpu or a small one?

    I can't tell you as I've never done it myself even though I own a Raspberry Pi with a weak ARM CPU.

    You may know how painful emulated ARM is on x86 CPUs even if it's a latest gen i7. So it might be like that on ARM when you emulate x86. They are two totally different CPU architectures... Lots of problems to overcome.

    If you have a spare ARM dedi try it out yourself.

  • I think there's a free trial on scaleway. May you would help me emulating if you don't mind?

  • @JustRefleX said:
    Hmm. If I emulate x86, will it have a huge impact on the performance per cpu or a small one?

    Big performance cost with QEMU. Supposedly this commercial product does better: http://eltechs.com/product/exagear-desktop/

    Thanked by 1teknolaiz
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