Is Facebook Planning a Move to ARM Based Servers?

https://josephscott.org/archives/2013/12/is-facebook-planning-a-move-to-arm-based-servers/

by josephscott • 13 years ago

27 22 13 years ago

The proposed applications (network control plane) don't correspond to what you would write in PHP (the main Facebook app).

The arm64 stuff on the other hand is looming like being the first new RISC architecture since er alpha and there may well be a move towards using it. There was a story recently that Google has an ARM license too.

salient3• 13 years ago

So is Google:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull...

kintamanimatt2• 13 years ago

Why ARM? What are the benefits of ARM compared to other architectures? Are there drawbacks to the architecture?

salient3• 13 years ago

For the same reason Apple is making its own custom ARM CPU right now - it can be highly integrated with whatever they want it to be, and it has exactly what they need, and none of the stuff they don't need. You can build solutions that are much more custom with ARM.

kintamanimatt2• 13 years ago

Isn't it cheaper just to use a general purpose CPU than design and fabricate a custom one?

gaius4• 13 years ago

Well that's not a property of ARM the CPU but ARM the business model (IP licensing). And ARM aren't the only player in this space, there is also MIPS (and others).

porsupah• 13 years ago

As above; ARM grew from a very low-power beginning (some 250mW total for the original ARM-2 chipset of CPU, IOC, MEMC, and VIDC, running at 8MHz on 2 micron tech, in 1989), and has remained low-power since. Whilst the CPU’s obviously only a part of any server, I’d imagine that the savings in power usage across as many servers as companies like Google and Facebook have are the driving force behind these evaluations.

twotwotwo• 13 years ago

Maybe for things like photo storage, where CPU speed isn't that important. Baidu is already using ARM servers for cloud storage.

tdmackey• 13 years ago

They've been hiring for this for a while now, https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=engineering...

cordite• 13 years ago

Didn't HP consider making blade like units with up to 20 servers per unit? I saw that they canceled that due to some deal with Intel.

Is Facebook Planning a Move to ARM Based Servers?

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