ARM based servers hold the promise of extremely low power and excellent performance per Watt ratios. It's theoretically possible to place an incredible number of servers into a single rack; there are already implementations with as many as 1000 ARM servers in one rack (48 server nodes in a 2U chassis). What's more, all of those nodes consume less than 5KW combined (or around 5W per quad-core ARM node). But whenever a new technology is hyped, it's important to remain objective. The media loves to rave about new trends and people like reading about "some new thing"; however, at the end of the day the system administrator has to keep his IT services working and convince his boss to invest in new technologies.

At first sight, the relatively low performance per core of ARM CPUs seems like a bad match for servers. The dominant CPU in the server market is without doubt Intel's Xeon. The success of the Xeon family is largely rooted in its excellent single-threaded (or per core) performance at moderate power levels (70-95W). Combine this exceptional single-threaded performance with a decent core count and you get good performance in almost any kind of application. Economies of scale and the resulting price levels are also very important, but the server market has been more than willing to pay a little extra if the response times are lower and the energy bills moderate.

A data point proving that single-threaded performance is still important is the evolution of the T-series of Oracle (or Sun if you prefer). The Sun T3 had 16 cores with 128 threads; the T4 however had only 8 cores with 8 threads each, and CEO Larry Ellison touted more than once that single-threaded performance was massively improved, up to five times faster. Do we really need another server with a flock of slow but energy efficient cores? Has history not taught us that a few "bulls" is better than "a flock of chickens"?

History has also shown that the amount of memory per server is very important. Many HPC and virtualization applications are limited by the amount of RAM. The current Cortex-A9 generation of ARM CPUs has a 32-bit address bus and does not support more than 4GB.

And yet, the interest in ARM-based servers is growing, and there is more to it than just hype. Yes, ARM-based CPUs still lack the number crunching power and the massive amount of DIMM slots that Xeon's memory controller can handle, but ARM CPUs score extremely well when it comes to cost and power consumption.

ARM based CPU have also made giant steps forward when it comes to performance. To give you a few data points: a dual ARM Cortex-A9 at 1.2GHz (Samsung Exynos 1.2GHz) introduced in 2011 compresses more than 10 times faster than the typical ARM 11 based cores in 2008. The SunSpider performance increased by a factor 20 according to Anand's measurements on the iPhones (though part of that is almost certainly thanks to browser and software optimizations). The latest ARM Cortex-A15 is again quite a bit more powerful, offering about 50% higher performance. The A57 will add 64-bit support and is estimated to deliver 20 to 30% higher performance. In short, the single-threaded performance is increasing quickly, and the same is true for the amount of RAM that can be addresssed. The ARM Cortex-A9 is limited to 4GB but the Cortex-A15 should be able to address 16GB while the A57 will be able to address a lot more.

It is likely just a matter of time before ARM products can start to chip away at segments of the server market. How much time? The best way to find out is to look at the most mature ARM server shipping today: the Calxeda based Boston Viridis. Just what can this server handle today, where does it have the potential to succeed, and what are its shortcomings? Let's find out.

It's a Cluster, Not a Server
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  • kfreund - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link

    Keep in mind that this is VERY early in the life cycle, and therefore costs are artificially high due to low volumes. Ramp up the volumes, and the prices will come WAY down.
  • wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link

    Ja, IF they have high volume. But even if there is high volume, it's shared between different ARM suppliers and needless to say, the ATOM. How much can it be for one company?

    But the question is where the ARM get the volume? less performance, comparable power consumption, less performance/watt rational (not this kind extreme bias case ), less flexibility, less software support (stability), vendor specific (you can build a normal server, but can you build up a massive parallel cluster?), oh, don't forgot, more (much more) expensive. Which company will sacrifice themselves to beef up the market volume of the ARM server?
  • Sputnik_b - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    Hi Johan,
    Nice job benchmarking and analyzing the results. Our group at EPFL has recently done some work aimed at understanding the demands that scale-out workloads, such as web serving, place on processor architectures. Our findings very much agree with your benchmark conclusions for the Xeon/Calxeda pair. However, a key result of our work was that many-core processors (with dozens of simple cores per chip) are the sweet spot with regard to performance per TCO dollar. I encourage you to take a look at our work -- http://parsa.epfl.ch/~grot/pubs/SOP-TCO_IEEEMicro....
    Please consider benchmarking a Tilera system to round-out your evaluation.
    Best regards!
  • Sputnik_b - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    Sorry, bad URL in the post above. This should work: http://parsa.epfl.ch/~grot/pubs/SOP-TCO_IEEEMicro....
  • aryonoco - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link

    LWN.net has a very interesting write-up on a talk given by Facebook's Director of Capacity Engineering & Analysis on the future of ARM servers and how they see ARM servers fit in with their operation. I think it gives valuable insight on this topic.

    http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/542518/bb5d5d3498359... (free link)
  • phoenix_rizzen - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link

    ARM already has hardware virtualisation extensions. Linux-KVM has already been ported over to support it.
  • Andys - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - link

    Great article, finally good to see some realistic benchmarks run on the new ARM platform.

    But I feel that you screwed up in one regard: You should have tested the top Xoen CPU also - the E5-2690.

    As you know from your own previous articles, Intel's top CPUs are also the most power efficient under full load, and the price would still be cheaper than the full loaded Calxeda box anyway.
  • an3000 - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link

    It is a test using wrong software stack. Yes, I am not afraid to say that! Apache will never be used on such ARM servers. They are exact match for Memcached or Nginx or another set-get type services, like static data serving. Using Apache or LAMP stack is too much favorable for Xeon.
    What I would like to see is: Xeon server with max RAM non-virtualized running 4-8 (similar to core count) instances of Memcached/Nginx/lighttpd vs cluster of ARM cores doing the same light task. Measure performance and power usage.
  • wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link

    My suggestion will be let them run one hard-disk to one hard-disk copy and measure the power usage:)

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