Calxeda's ARM server tested [LWN.net]

Calxeda's ARM server tested

Posted Mar 14, 2013 13:15 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
In reply to: LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers by wingo
Parent article: LC-Asia: Facebook contemplates ARM servers

Another recent article:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6757/calxedas-arm-server-te...

I'm still skeptical that ARM Servers are anything but a fad. As RealWorldTech's article above noted, they'll need to offer 10x improvement in some aspect of a job in order to make inroads. Which means they'll need to specialize in a big way to get to that. And even then, I'm doubtful.

It remains to be seen if ARMv8 (64 bit) can improve performance enough without increasing power to make a difference.

Calxeda's ARM server tested

Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:45 UTC (Fri) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link] (2 responses)

> I'm still skeptical that ARM Servers are anything but a fad.

I'd say at the moment they are hype. How many models are commercially usable without the kind of experiments described in the article? How many have been sold?

Whether they will be forgotten after the hype, whether they will turn into a fad (like netbooks 5 years ago) or whether to will come to stay I wouldn't dare to predict. It looks promising to me, so as a distro or Linux vendor I would be working on it. But many things have looked promising at some stage and they have never lived up to their promises. But unless you are Facebook or Google or anything close to that I would not care about deployment yet. Until Aarch64 is ready for mass-deployment it's too early to say. Of course if somebody has some nice business idea in the area and can get venture capital for it, why not. For an engineer ARM is much nicer than another widely used architecture...

Calxeda's ARM server tested

Posted Mar 15, 2013 19:06 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that ARM servers are here to stay.

However, I am NOT saying that ARM servers will replace amd64 servers in the datacenter.

ARM servers are here to stay for home/small office environments where a small ARM box (including many current wireless access points) provides all the power needed to be a fileserver, mail server, web server, etc.

I agree with you that it's an open question if ARM servers are going to scale up to replace the high-density datacenter nodes or not.

But distros should be supporting ARM anyway, because there are already many places where they are 'good enough', and as they get more powerful, the number of places where they will be 'good enough' is going to grow.

Low power home server

Posted Mar 18, 2013 21:36 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Well said. I have had a SheevaPlug server for my home for several years and I am very happy with it. Now I am planning to change it with a Raspberry Pi, which might also be used as a desktop if the need arises. They are versatile computers that waste very little energy and can be left on 24/7.

ARM is the third most popular architecture for Debian after amd64 and i386. Interestingly, armel appears to have reached a plateau lately, with the highest point around late 2011.