AMD reveals its first ARM processor: 8-core Opteron A1100

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/amd-reveals-its-first-arm-processor-8-core-opteron-a1100/

by shawndumas • 12 years ago

306 191 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

jjoe• 12 years ago

So excited about the prospects but I just can't get past this sentence:

Rounding out the SoCs, they'll also include dedicated engines for cryptography and compression.

"They" have ruined it for me...

dmm• 12 years ago

Forgive me if I'm being dense but what harm would embedded crypto and compression engines do? You don't have to use them right?

fleitz6• 12 years ago

There's little room for tampering with crypto, the only room is for tampering with the RNGs.

As far as I know all crypto algorithms are deterministic based on the key/IV and the data.

rpledge• 12 years ago

These aren't unusual features in SoCs. Of course if you're concerned about backdoors you don't have to invoke these engines, at least with a software implementation you can control the implementation.

thomasjames• 12 years ago

That is a pretty great thing, as far as I am concerned. Custom ASICs for routine server tasks that would otherwise clog up a general purpose core? I'll take it.

jevinskie• 12 years ago

At this point, hardware crypto engines are a "must have" feature for many purchasers. Their desire for performance outweighs concerns about malicious actors backdooring the crypto engine.

And if the crypto engine is compromised, how little/great of a leap is it to believe there is microcode to backdoor a general OS or crypto library?

quackerhacker3• 12 years ago

I gotta give AMD massive credit...while I have mainly used intel in my setups, AMD has really pushed their offerings.

First I remember everyone driving the price up of an AMD video card just because bitcoin mining.

Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware.

Now an Arm 8-core CPU...although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming, still AMD's pricing would entice me to buy 2 for the price of 1 Intel i7

ekianjo8• 12 years ago

Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware.

Does not mean much. Their APU used in these consoles is very weak compared to what we have in mid to high end PC graphics cards. They were obviously chosen for their price there, not for the performance (which is MEH at best).

corresation2• 12 years ago

It's approximately equal to a 7870 (the PS3 variant), which is anything but "weak". Indeed, it's what's in my play PC, and plays any current game with ease. As to AMD generally, well they have by far the leading compute cards, and hold their own in the high end, so certainly not "meh".

coldpie• 12 years ago

I suspect this is a different argument from yours, but the console sales have actually been a huge boon for AMD: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amd-reports-second-c...

NolF• 12 years ago

although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming

Remember that the clock speed is not necesarely everything. AMD may be able to get more work done with those 2Ghz than a Snapdragon 800 might using similar or less energy.

userbinator7• 12 years ago

And clock speed can't be compared across (micro)architectures either - remember the days of NetBurst P4s?

As far as I know, x86 (P6-based) is still king in IPC.

mmanfrin• 12 years ago

They got that Mac Pro spot, as well; half the price of the base model is from the GFX cards.

SwellJoe2• 12 years ago

How about also comparing the power usage? At 25 watts, you can get three of these for one six core Intel CPU; so you're at 24 cores at 2 GHz vs 6 cores at 3 GHz (and probably still at a lower price). The GHz can't really be directly compared, though. Even comparing GHz across Intel product generations isn't useful. I have a 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo in my desktop that I think (I haven't really benchmarked, but I've run a Litecoin miner on both for testing) does about half the work of the 3.2 GHz i7 in my laptop.

All that said, I have a 16 core AMD server in colo that is running at about 3% usage across all CPUs, and yet it is slow as hell because the disk subsystem can't keep up (replacing the spinning disks with SSDs as we speak). The reality is that CPU is not the bottleneck in the vast majority of web service applications. Memory and disk subsystems are the bottlenecks in every system I manage.

So, I love the idea of a low power, low cost, CPU that still packs enough of a punch to work in virtualized environments. Dedicate one of each of these cores to your VMs; would be pretty nice, I think.

brigade• 12 years ago

Well, Intel vaguely sells a 4-core Xeon at 1.8/2.8 GHz with 25 W TDP [1], then between the hyperthreading and higher IPC you've mostly made up for the fewer cores relative to this ARM part.

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...

hhw3• 12 years ago

The Avoton Atom C2750 which is already out now is also 8 cores, but at 2.4GHz and with the entire SoC at 20W. It's supposed to have comparable performance to a Xeon E5520 quad-core/8-thread 2.26GHz CPU from 3 generations back, or about half the performance of a current quad-core/8-thread Xeon E3 1230v3. And it supports virtualization extensions.

I agree that I/O and not the CPU is usually the bottleneck though.

berkut4• 12 years ago

Memory / Cache subsystems are generally where ARM chips fall down (in terms of throughput), and Intel has several patents on cache hierarchies that AMD is licensed to use.

So it's technically possible that AMD could build ARM chips that are a lot more competitive (FLOPS-wise) with Intel than other manufacturers can.

jccooper• 12 years ago

An i7 will auto-boost its clock speed (if it's cool enough); it could actually be running at 3.9GHz during your mining. Won't make up twice the work the way, so there's still some architectural improvements, but that's not all the story.

gaius3• 12 years ago

Clock speed is only relevant when comparing the same CPU.

I have been having this argument since the 1980s in the school playground when kids with Spectrums would claim their 4Mhz Z80s were faster than 2Mhz 6502s...

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

Retrocomputing enthusiasts keep debates like this alive even today.

With single-byte addressing, I'd say even a 1 MHz 6502 can make a 4 MHz Z-80 sweat. ;-)

And, for the MSX crowd, having to do 3 OUT's, one IN and an OR just to set a pixel is definitely ludicrous.

blahbl4hblahtoo3• 12 years ago

@ 2Ghz they can probably produce large quantities. It sounds like they went for a "safe" fabrication process so that the initial rollout is as defect free as it can.

I really hope MS ports windows server to it...

fleitz6• 12 years ago

This may be a much bigger threat to intel than AMD64 was.

skylan_q2• 12 years ago

ISAs eat the market from the bottom-up.

x86 is at risk here.

fleitz6• 12 years ago

Especially with AMDs ability to throw GPU hardware on the CPU. ARM eats the bottom end on a $/Watt model, and the GPU eats the top end on a raw performance model.

hhw3• 12 years ago

In order to take significant market share, AMD will either need to offer superior price/performance and/or superior performance/watt. Both are unlikely because at 28nm, by the time the A1100 hits the market it will effectively be two manufacturing processes behind Intel's 14nm. Manufacturing process size makes a big difference in production costs, as well as in power efficiency. The microarchitecture won't even be a factor with that great a disparity.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

That's an... odd perspective. AMD64 was a huge threat to Intel. It dominated the then flagship P4 and completely destroyed Intel's attempt to force us into an "Itanium everywhere" future.

The fact it didn't leave AMD in charge of the x86-compatible market owes more to their superb Israeli chip design team being able to pull them out of the frying pan.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

Considering AMD64 took down the Itanium and basically defined the industry, it has a ways to go and Intel's response to AMD64 might be instructive.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

I don't see AMD's play here. What value do they add with a processor that they don't design, don't fab, and can't produce in the kind of volume tablet and phone chips get produced?

gnoway• 12 years ago

I don't understand your comment. "Doesn't design and doesn't fab" describes every ARM licensee. Also, this chip isn't going anywhere near phones or tablets. Did you look at the specifications?

rayiner5• 12 years ago

The other ARM licensees have a hook: Qualcomm integrates with its LTE base bands, Apple builds a phone around it, etc. The phone/tablet angle is important because the high volumes in those markets help justify big design teams at Qualcomm and Apple.

zik• 12 years ago

ARM designs the "IP core" of the processor but doesn't fab anything themselves. AMD brings their own SOC design and fab process.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

AMD is fabless, so what they bring is an SOC design. But what can they offer in an SOC other companies can't? I guess Hypertransport?

icegreentea• 12 years ago

It's possible that this is their first foray into ARM with a core license to get a feel, and their next iteration will be with an architecture license (which they can get some design value add).

strlen• 12 years ago

They seem to be aiming this at the server market: the volumes will be lower than tablet and phone chips.

fleitz6• 12 years ago

AMD's hook is servers + GPU.

fancyketchup• 12 years ago

Why does a server need a GPU?

msoad• 12 years ago

I don't know anything about chips. But I know ARM architecture was around for decades. Why it's hot again? I get the point for using it in smartphones and tablets, but why should servers use ARM?

shornlacuna• 12 years ago

Superior performance per watt.

klodolph• 12 years ago

There are three metrics getting thrown around:

* Performance per dollar operating cost (performance per watt is closest to this)

* Performance per dollar capital expenditure (important for desktop systems, where operating costs are low)

* Performance per dollar TCO (sum of the above two)

The third one is the important one.

cdash• 12 years ago

What evidence is there that performance per watt is actually better on ARM when dealing with server processors?

bitkrieg• 12 years ago

X86 chips (especially Intel's) are leagues ahead in terms of performance per watt.

In fact not only regarding performance per watt, but also performance per dollar. It's just that ARM designs for lowest power consumption while Intel/AMD design for maximum perfomance.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

It's hot because the tablet and smartphone market exploded, creating a demand for high performance, low-power cores that could be flexibly integrated into SoC's with other parts. With that new market came volume, and in the processor market, volume is important. The reason x86 overtook RISC architectures is that the high volume of x86 chips generated revenues that allowed for massive capital investment in x86 designs. The tablet and phone market is driving a similar process for ARM chips. Right now, there are at least three very well-funded lines of ARM micro architectures: Qualcomm's, Apple's, and ARM's. It's been a long time since a non-x86 platform got that kind of investment.

salem• 12 years ago

That, and because historically, the ARM instruction set has always been the gold-standard power-efficient 32-bit architecture. Especially in thumb mode.

Open-source software and the extreme efficiency goals of data centers make an interesting alternative to x86 now.

X4• 12 years ago

I already start to feel like a grandpa talking about 8080, x86 processors. The next generation may not even remember what x86 is. The movie mimzy predicted intel to stay there until the far future, when they are able to fabric self-assembling smart chips.

vidarh2• 12 years ago

You are right that smartphones have drive demand for higher performance and hence more expensive / higher margin ARM CPUs.

But overall ARM volume has been far higher than x86 volume for a long time even excluding all smartphones and tablets.

Most of our x86 servers at work have more ARM CPU's on them than they have x86 cores (most of the harddrives have controllers with ARM CPU's - some of them multi-core etc.). You'll also find it all over the place from washing machines to set-top boxes to microwaves. You find ARM cores in some sd-cards even.

I believe the projected number of cores for ARM last year was around 3 billion. I doubt x86 passed 500 million, which also means that both MIPS and PPC is competing with x86 for second place in number of cores for 32bit+ CPU's. (On the 16 bit or below end you also have surprises like 6502 derivatives shipping in ludicrous volumes)

So x86 has been "hot" for the market for main CPU's in devices consumers recognise as computers, and has been by far the most profitable architecture for a long time. Outside of that, though, it's at best at second place in total volume, and in most non-computer markets it's more likely to place in 3rd to 5th place in volume.

userbinator7• 12 years ago

If you look at it from the perspective of expressiveness, the CISC-ness of the x86 ISA also allows far more opportunity for hardware-level enhancements than a RISC style one: the code density is higher, meaning better cache usage and less memory bandwidth needed (especially with multiple cores), and there's still a lot of relatively complex instructions with the potential to be made even faster. RISC came from a time when memory bandwidths were higher and the bottleneck was instruction execution inside the CPU, but now it's the opposite; memory bandwidth and latency is becoming the bottleneck. There's only so much you can do to speed up an ARM core without adding new instructions.

Linus has some interesting things to say about this too: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html

Stubb• 12 years ago

Maximizing density and still keeping everything within operating temperatures is one of the toughest parts of data center operations. Not to mention the cost of generating all that waste heat. Many tasks are not CPU bounded, so the ARM is plenty good for them.

Symmetry• 12 years ago

Same reason that x86 became hot, really. There are these newfangled PCs/smartphones that are providing ridiculous volumes that create network effects and defray design expenses. Back in the day the idea of x86 in a server was crazy, but they were able to break into the server market from the bottom and mostly consumed it. The same might happen with ARM, or it might not since Intel is in a better position than the RISC vendors were with it's near monopoly giving it access to phenomenal engineering resources.

csense• 12 years ago

Intel is in a better position than the RISC vendors were

Actually, Intel might be in a worse position with respect to vendor lock-in. I'm guessing a lot of early servers' lower layers like OS, webserver, etc. were proprietary; convincing the vendor to support x86 would have been a hard sell; and porting your application to an x86 environment was difficult.

All of these things would have had a tendency to lock people into their existing hosting choices.

Nowadays most servers run mostly / completely FOSS (at the lower layers) that can be easily ported to ARM. I'd imagine porting code to x86 from VAX or DEC or mainframe or whatever, was a lot more painful than porting PHP, Django or Ruby web apps to ARM today.

Of course, Intel does have deeper pockets and much of the desktop market, and may well be able to use that to keep ARM in check despite the fact that switching CPU architectures is probably much easier for website owners today than it was when Intel was trying to break into the server market.

userbinator7• 12 years ago

I think reusing the Opteron name is really not a good idea, since now there'll be x86 Opterons and ARM Opterons. Maybe Apteron would've been a better choice...

skylan_q2• 12 years ago

I agree it could be a point of confusion, but anyone buying an Opteron would probably be looking at the CPU specs anyways.

bostonpete• 12 years ago

How about "Opterarm"? :-)

cpeterso• 12 years ago

Armteron?

elipsey3• 12 years ago

Can I propose Optifist? A super-computing system based on said CPU could then be nameed Deep Fist...

Zenst• 12 years ago

Fair point and some excellent alternatives been mooted.

I think AMD are positioning this for the server market (though would love a nice cheap desktop with this chip. With that they are levridging there only real asset in branding and I feel it will not water down but help the Opteron range live on, given they are moving away from the x86 area.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Maybe they should call it "Letniuoywercs" I don't know how to pronounce it either :-)

I agree that re-using the name is bad mojo from a marketing perspective, too many people will be caught off guard by the lack of compatibility with the x86 chip set.

alexandros• 12 years ago

Apteron in Greek (Άπτερον), the one with no wings. Other things being equal, maybe they should go with something else :)

userbinator7• 12 years ago

On the other hand, that's what we could call them if they were as successful as the Itanic.

e12e5• 12 years ago

Wait, where are these names taken from? Neither Opteron of Apteron turned up anything...?

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

Unless non-x86 desktop PCs become mainstream in the consumer market, I don't think there is much risk of confusion. The channels will be completely different and I don't think it will be easy to buy a motherboard with an Opteron A anytime soon.

GarrettBeck• 12 years ago

I have a feeling history is going to repeat itself. Statements like "AMD believes that it will be the leader of this ARM Server market" reminds me of the DRAM boom-and-bust from 2006-2009. The new (old) hot technology froths the market into a frenzy and semiconductor fabs start rushing to get a slice of the action.

Does Qimonda ring a bell to anyone?

elipsey3• 12 years ago

It's a relief that AMD has a performance/watt alternative to bulldozer. I sure hope they can keep being a business so I have someone to buy hardware from that doesn't fuse off features to screw us out of a %65 margin.

Either way, I'm hoping ARM64 will trickle up from iThingies to the desktop so I can buy a CPU with Virtual MMIO without paying an extra hundred bucks.

ANTSANTS2• 12 years ago

Maybe their desktop and server CPUs aren't so hot right now, but I don't think you have to worry about AMD for a while. All of the current generation of consoles have AMD GPUs, those GPUs are on the same die as an AMD CPU for two of the three (PS4 and Xbone), AMD GPUs remain competitive with NVidia's offerings, and they seem to be winning mindshare with their lower-level Mantle graphics API.

EDIT: And the whole Bitcoin-mining thing (or Litecoin/Dogecoin mining thing, these days), as mentioned in another thread.

elipsey3• 12 years ago

Does AMD GPU hardware have a general advantage mining?

err, can you link me to the other thread?

pippy2• 12 years ago

We're getting close to the age where you can buy a off the shelf AMD desktop machine with Linux, a good graphics card, and the same performance of a x86-64.

orik• 12 years ago

You mean an ARM machine?

pippy2• 12 years ago

Yes, sorry I meant to type in ARM.

zanny3• 12 years ago

I think saying 8 A57 cores at 2ghz is anything close to x86 at 3.5+ghz on 4 cores.

Clock for clock, pipe for pipe (15 stages in A57, 14-19 in Haswell) x86 still wins because of per-instruction operand volume.

Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc.

elwin• 12 years ago

Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc.

As a general rule, power varies with the cube of frequency. 50W will only get about 2.5 GHz.

bentcorner• 12 years ago

Where are things wrt the rest of the experience? Can I run FF, Gimp, OpenOffice, arbitrary distros? What about Steam?

sp332• 12 years ago

While support varies, it's pretty common for Linux programs to be written with an eye to portability. It's really up to the distro to package things up nicely. Most distros that decide to support ARM have many packages in the repos, just as easy to install as x86. You can search here for packages in the ARM port of Archlinux http://archlinuxarm.org/packages Here's a list of ARM packages from Debian http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/armel/

bitL• 12 years ago

25W :-(

As much as I wish AMD getting ahead, this is not good news for efficient ARM servers.

hhandoko• 12 years ago

Why do you think 25W TDP is not good?

I thought it was OK, getting the most performance vs keeping the TDP within passive cooling territory.

dragontamer2• 12 years ago

25W includes the I/O.

8 SATA-3 ports and two 10-GbE ports will run you a lot of power. I can't think of a single SoC that supports that much I/O.

signa11• 12 years ago

wasn't it someone at facebook who remarked that they would be interested in ARM cpu's once the freq > 2.5Ghz, also it seems that google also has a bunch of pa-semi guys, so, they working on an ARM clone isn't so far fetched...

edit: found the link http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/16/google_intel_arm_ana...

chx• 12 years ago

Two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Within a 25W envelope??? I thought dual 10GbE chips consume 10-15W.

wmf3• 12 years ago

Those chips are old.

donavanm3• 12 years ago

Optics are a big chunk also. A new controller with DAC Gbe phy is probably more like 7-8W. They only need to do the controller on this chip. A couple watts for the Phy are part of the motherboards budget.

colanderman4• 12 years ago

Dual 10 GbE built-in? Sweet. Wonder what the price will be; a dual 10 GbE Intel card goes for $500 alone.

More importantly – will they provide zero-copy I/O like you can get with Intel network cards via their DPDK [1] or PF_RING/DNA [2]?

[1] http://dpdk.org/ [2] http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/dna/

thrownaway24243• 12 years ago

I don't think that's "sweet" I think that's a bad decision. What if I don't need two of those per 10 arm cores? Now I'm just paying for gates I don't need.

AnthonyMouse• 12 years ago

What if you don't need AES encryption? Now you're just paying for gates you don't need. What if you don't need SIMD instructions? Now you're just paying for gates you don't need.

It doesn't matter. Modern processors have the complete opposite problem. It isn't that transistors are expensive, it's that they're so cheap you end up with too many and they generate too much heat. If you can stick a block on there which 60% of your customers can use and the other 40% can shut off to leave more headroom for frequency scaling, it's a win.

Also, the number of gates you need for a network controller is small.

wmf3• 12 years ago

You haven't been paying for the silicon for a while; when you buy a chip you're really paying for the design and it's cheaper to design one chip with all the features people might need.

vidarh2• 12 years ago

Then you buy a different chip if they're not cost effective.

As an entry into the server market, this sounds awesome; for things like storage aggregation and vm migration, gigabit ethernet is becoming a real bottleneck for many applications as the core counts has gone up.

colanderman4• 12 years ago

In server farms, who cares if the processor costs $400 or $500. Energy usage is the biggest cost over time, and this silicon (presumably) isn't powered if it's not used.

sitkack3• 12 years ago

We have more gates than we know what do with. There is little correlation with die area and end user price.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

It's much cheaper to make a chip that both you and the other 99% of the people (that need 2 ethernet ports/CPU) need than making a specific chip for each market.

donavanm3• 12 years ago

At $400 I assume youre thinking of something like an Intel X520 DA2 plus optics. If you can tolerate the power you can do 82599 with dual Phys for more like $150-200.

Obviously I have no idea on the network controller or its sdk/driver support.

justincormack3• 12 years ago

You dont really want to buy a 25W SoC and then blow a load more power on the networking. It might be expected you use 802.3ap.

colanderman4• 12 years ago

Yes, I was. Didn't know this could be done cheaper, thanks!

kev0092• 12 years ago

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/ is supposed to be generic to any NIC

justincormack3• 12 years ago

It needs some driver modifications, but they are not huge. It still only supports 3 or so of the most common cards on FreeBSD though.

eroullit• 12 years ago

DPDK is Intel's turf and PF RING only supports igb/ixgbe/e1000 drivers. For out of the box usage, looking at Netmap or Linux PACKET_MMAP (though not entirely zero-copy) should be possible.

colanderman4• 12 years ago

Nice. How did I not know about these. Time to do some research!

protomyth2• 12 years ago

I do wonder when we'll be able to order a motherboard and how much information will be available to create new drivers.

vardump2• 12 years ago

Last time someone made ARM CPU with 1100 in model name, Intel bought them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#SA-1100.

jeffdavis3• 12 years ago

Does the ARM architecture have anything like the nested page tables in recent x86-64 chips? Or is that an orthogonal processor feature that is not required (or forbidden) in a particular implementation of ARM/x86-64?

To make a real entrance into the server market, I would expect good virtualization support to be nearly a requirement.

robot2• 12 years ago

It has support for virtualization. There is a two stage translation where the first stage handles guest operating system and second stage handles the hypervisor mappings. Both stages have nested page tables.

Also there is an IOMMU implementation for supporting virtualization for IO. For example, the IOMMU and CPU MMU page table mappings are synchronized such that a DMA controller would also adhere to page table mappings set up for the CPU.

jeffdavis3• 12 years ago

Regarding the IOMMU:

A recent post revealed some security problems using firewire (and a few other technologies) related to DMA[1]. Would the IOMMU features you're talking about prevent that problem?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7123121

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Where is the market for this, apart from Facebook (Open Compute Project)? Is it set to compete with CPUs like the Xeon E3-1220L series? Will it end up in HP's Moonshot? I thought that bigger boxes with virtualization would be more economical for most uses than closets full of low-power CPUs.

Perhaps I/O is the key here, N of these A1100 CPUs can easily saturate N x 2 x 10GbE, a single box with 64+ cores probably cannot push 16 x 10GbE.

venomsnake• 12 years ago

Probably it is build it and they will come strategy.

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

The developer board runs Fedora. Any workload that does not depend on a specific CPU architecture (mostly everything but Windows) should run on it. The dev board is there to make it possible to developers to fine tune their implementations so they run well on the new platform.

Will server makers buy it? That remains to be seen.

Making a dev board available (let's hope it's also cheap enough to make hobbyists buy it) is rather clever. Without software tuned for it, the chip could fail on the market like Sun's Niagara and Intel's Itanium did.

thomasfl• 12 years ago

While this seems to be targeted for small low power web servers, I really want low powered, cool and low temperature laptops. Laptops with hot intel processors are cooking my body if I actually keep my laptop on my lap.

kybernetyk• 12 years ago

I have the late 2013 MacBook Air with the new Haswell Core i5 CPU and it's the first time I can put my notebook on my lap for as long as I want without getting a heat stroke.

As long as I don't do computing intensive stuff like playing games or visiting some websites that overuse javascript the MBA runs really cool. Cooler than my body temperature.

-- typed on my MBA, lying on the couch, having it placed on my belly ;)

blahbl4hblahtoo3• 12 years ago

I have an HP touchsmart haswell i7 that is fantastic with heat and battery life...

userbinator7• 12 years ago

Modern processors draw very little power at idle; it's only at full load that they reach TDP. If your laptop is constantly doing something with its CPU then it will obviously get much warmer than one that's just idling. I have one with a Core Duo and it barely gets warm if I'm just reading static webpages and editing text, but really heats up if I'm gaming or watching videos.

hosh• 12 years ago

Cool. I can finally build that ZFS plug computer I wanted :-D

dragontamer2• 12 years ago

I don't think people "get it".

This is a microserver, designed to connect up I/O bound resources to each other. Imagine a cache like Squid running on this thing. Imagine mulitiple RAID-0 SSD drives on one side, and 20Gbps going out through the network.

This is NOT a computationally difficult task. For computationally difficult tasks, you have 8-core $2000 E5 Xeons (which get more and more efficient the bigger the workload you have).

However, filling your datacenter with $2000 Xeons so that they can spend 0.01% of their CPU power copying data from SSD drives to the network is a waste of money and energy.

The A1100 looks like it will be a solution in the growing microserver space. As Facebook and Google scales, they have learned that a large subset of their datacenters are I/O bound and that they're grossly overspending on CPU power.

Big CPUs -> Big TDPs -> higher energy costs.

This machine is designed with big I/O throughput (multiple 10GbE and 8 SATA ports on-chip), with the barest minimum CPU possible to save on energy costs.

The upcoming competitors to this market are HP Moonshot (Intel Atoms), AMD Opteron A1100, and... that's about it. Calexda's Boston Viridis has died, so that is one less competitor in this niche.

AMD reveals its first ARM processor: 8-core Opteron A1100

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