2014: Development Opportunities for ARM and Cloud Co-existence, Problems and Challenges co-exist

The battle for architecture between ARM and Intel processors continues. Intel x86 advanced in the industry's status is indeed unshakeable, but ARM significant power advantages, the future will obviously be more attractive. What kind of CPU can best meet the needs of the future?

ARM released the Cortex-A15 processor in 2011 with a multicore, out-of-order superscalar design clocked at up to 2.5 GHz. The Cortex-A15 is significant because it runs counter to previous generations of ARM designs, where the previous generation ARM processors achieved the lowest power consumption at the expense of performance. In contrast, the Cortex-A15 is a clear target for achieving robust performance metrics and low-power consumption is secondary. Essentially, ARM Holdings, an intellectual property company that licenses its own designs to other manufacturers, makes chips from manufacturers and then applies the chips to systems from other manufacturers. The end of 2012, the market began to appear with Cortex-A15 design of the product is expected in 2013 there will be more such products.

However, the processor company that wants to win the future competition is not only ARM one. A few weeks ago, Intel released a new low-power CPU based on its own Atom architecture for data centers. The Atom S1200 series is designed to provide instruction set compatibility for x86 on low-power system-on-chip. Atom S1200 series mainly for microservers and other performance-oriented, low power consumption applications.

Intel Atom S1200 Micro Server Processor

The following is a brief comparison of the Samsung Exynos 5250 with the recently introduced Cortex-A15 licensed implementation and the Intel Atom S1260, a high-end S1200 series product. The Exynos 5 Series is used in the latest Samsung Google Chromebooks and Nexus 10 tablets. It should be noted that the Samsung Exynos5250 and Intel Atom S1260 processors are only two large families, so the best optimization of a market is not entirely suitable for another market. The most typical example is Exynos 4 GB memory limit, which is normal for mobile applications, but obviously not suitable for cloud computing. However, the Cortex-A15 architecture uses a 40-bit paging memory algorithm ("Big Physical Address Extensions") that can support up to 1 TB of memory.

* Note: Exynos 5250's power consumption is still unknown and hard to obtain. I searched through all Samsung documents, also failed to find. My only gain is in Stream Computing

The question now is which ARM and Intel x86 CPUs are better? However, this raises another question: Where is the better? The two markets Leverhawk is primarily interested in are mobile computing and cloud computing, so future analyzes will also More focused on these two aspects.

The main factors to be compared include:

Power consumption

performance

Application compatibility

Data Center Features

In the mobile world, if other things are the same, then power is an important decisive factor for success. Although the number of transistors, memory size and disk capacity are constantly increasing, but the battery performance has not increased. The ARM architecture is incredibly energy efficient and is currently used in a wide variety of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. But in addition to smartphones and tablets, the mobile market includes laptops and netbooks.

Lenovo K900 equipped with Intel dual-core Clover Trail processor

When it comes to smartphones and tablets, users often have the idea that "I want the device to be portable at all times and run for at least a full day without recharging. The device can not be too heavy for a huge battery; the device must have Excellent energy efficiency, but I need to keep the device going fast except I need to keep the battery all day, because I want to keep running apps on my device all the time.I do not need to run the same on my phone or tablet as my desktop I want to buy new software to fit the new usage model.I do not need terabytes of memory or superior data center features like ECC. "

As long as you get rid of the dependencies on existing operating systems and applications and assume that new applications (such as iOS and Android) will emerge, then ARM will be the absolute winner because of its superior energy efficiency while delivering good performance.

The laptop and netbook market will be slightly different. It might be like this, "I hope the battery can take 3 to 6 hours without charging. The device can be a little larger and heavier, so you can use a larger battery. Hopefully it will be like a desktop device, just moving So I want my device to be able to run a desktop application.When using a battery I can make some sacrifices in performance and I get excellent performance when plugged in. I need a few gigabytes of RAM but I do not need great Data Center Features. "

In this case, operating system and application compatibility are key features to consider, so an energy-efficient x86 design would be a better choice.

Now, all this is obvious, because the market is already in accordance with this trend. Let's see if we can extract some points:

ARM will continue to excel in the mobile device space, and new operating systems and applications in mobile devices will be more than adequate. Users can not run desktop applications, and battery life is also important.

However, in the short term, it is hard for ARM to make important gains in the field of notebook computers or netbooks. If I need a removable desktop, I want to be able to use all existing software. This situation can not be changed unless iOS or Android can run on devices with traditional keyboards and develop a rich enough ecosystem to replace all of my desktop features.

There may be an exception to this is a highly restricted laptop / netbook, such as a Google Chromebook. Run the application over the network using a web browser on these devices. These devices are not for everyone, but they can and have used ARM due to the tight control over the entire software stack and the associated changes in usage.

Surface Pro tablet

Intel's performance on smaller devices such as mobile phones and tablets is not satisfactory. While the latest Atom designs have reasonably good energy efficiency over traditional x86 standards, their performance-to-power ratio is still far behind the newest ARM designs. X86 does not have any advantages if it does not need to be compatible with traditional desktop PC software. For example, we see that Microsoft's new Surface RT tablet uses ARM, and the new Surface Pro uses x86 because of the need to provide compatibility with traditional Windows desktops. However, Surface Pro batteries last only half as much as Surface RT.

These points ultimately show that ARM is a huge threat to the traditional Wintel ecosystem giants Microsoft and Intel. If you consider that smartphones and tablets are becoming the mainstay of many mobile workers, mobile is a major growth market

So, cloud computing and server-side applications? In this environment, Intel x86 architecture suitable for home applications. In fact, most of today's data centers use Intel Xeon products. But will it change in the future? ARM's value proposition in the data center is straightforward: ARM has excellent energy efficiency, while data centers require a lot of energy. The use of ARM-based processing reduces overall power consumption in the data center, resulting in lower operating costs; better thermal density also helps drive small data centers.

Sounds good in theory, but can it actually survive?

In order to answer this question, we need to understand what the expected workload will be to run. The key workloads include:

· Traditional Windows and Linux instances

· Single-function, strict control of the workload, such as database

·cloud computing

Large web assets

Let's see in turn these workloads.

x86 can help the data center meet a variety of workload needs

Traditional Windows and Linux Instances - These are the traditional IT workloads we are familiar with today. Users want to run a variety of random Windows or Linux workloads. In this application, the compatibility of application software is the key. The hardware must provide excellent performance across applications. x86 shines in this situation. At present, Microsoft is studying the ARM port for Windows. While this will help to move part of the workload, it does not help to migrate hundreds of thousands of enterprise applications already running on x86.

Single Functionality, Controlled Workloads - If you have tight control over which applications are running, you can optimize your hardware to deliver the best price, performance, and power. A good example of this is the database, which is so important that it is worth doing. At present, Oracle and others have realized this and even provided optimized hardware systems such as Exadata. Whether ARM is right or not depends on whether you are optimizing power consumption or performance. For example, Oracle's Exadata optimizes performance and uses Intel Xeon processors without using ARM, but other workloads may be more suitable for ARM.

Cloud Computing - Cloud computing is in many ways similar to traditional Windows and Linux instances. If the service provider can not accurately predict the application that is about to run, a broad x86 compatible service is provided by default. In addition, if you judge and compare the cloud provider's price / performance metrics, then high-end Xeon processors will be.

Large-scale web assets - sometimes in a word you can see the name of ARM and Facebook at the same time appear. Large web assets are a special asset. First, it is massive, so energy saving is very important to the whole. Second, the workload is fairly tightly controlled and stable enough. Facebook's database runs all the individual workloads that make up the Facebook application, but these workloads usually have relatively high levels of stability. If the company can isolate some of these workloads, then properly optimize the infrastructure.

For example, Facebook processing that may be partially bundled with IO does not require extensive processing. This is the best time to introduce ARM to the environment. Facebook strictly controls applications running on ARM processors and can port the information they need. A number of Facebook applications are written in PHP format and can be executed in the HipHop JIT compilation engine. If Facebook extends JIT to support ARM, companies can quickly move large amounts of PHP code later. Other web assets can adopt similar strategies. But both Google and Microsoft have written about the use of the so-called "wimpy core" and come to a different conclusion: Google said it will not be used, but Microsoft is cautiously optimistic.

As a result, one common thrust is that x86 has a clear competitive advantage over ARM in terms of application compatibility. If you run a tightly controlled application, power optimization with ARM may be right for you, but x86 is a better bet if you want to handle a wide range of workloads and applications.

Therefore, Intel recently introduced Atom products may be the best choice. Although it is not as energy efficient as ARM, it drastically reduces power consumption while maintaining x86 software compatibility and delivering server-class features such as 64-bit processing, virtualization and memory error correction. Microsoft found that when using Atom processors to handle Bing workloads, it required significant optimization to meet performance requirements, but offered a number of benefits.

This powerful combination of software compatibility helped Intel's x86 family climb the pinnacle of modern CPUs. Although ARM has a clear advantage over x86 in terms of low power consumption, ARM requires users to abandon x86 software compatibility. This is acceptable in some situations, such as smartphones, tablets and highly-controlled data centers and cloud workloads. Whether the user does not need or want to run an existing x86 binary or code base too small, migrating to ARM is a real task.

However, in addition to these use cases, ARM is also facing a tricky thing. Intel's recent Atom processor optimized for microservers not only enables low power consumption, but also retains x86 compatibility. Despite these challenges, ARM has seen significant growth in smartphones and tablets, which are not x86 compatible. In the end, the smartphone / tablet market will expand to help create a large, ARM-based ecosystem that challenges x86 in the data center, but there are still other ways to accomplish this in areas beyond specialized applications Long way to go.

Although the ARM architecture offers unbelievable potential, it is still in its infancy and faces many great challenges. First of all, the latest generation of ARM chips have not been ready for the enterprise data center as soon as possible. So far, the ARM architecture only supports 32-bit instruction sets, which can lead to problems in the enterprise. Most server operating software and enterprise applications are based on 64-bit architecture and can not run on current ARM chips and platforms. Both Calxeda, Applied Micro and AMD are already aware of this big issue and are announcing the 64-bit release in late 2013 or early 2014.

Second, even though a 64-bit ARM chip is available, many enterprise applications need to be rewritten or recompiled for the ARM architecture. Microsoft has started to develop 64-bit versions of ARM, and Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Samsung and others recently launched the Linaro Enteprise Group to accelerate software development based on the ARM architecture. No vendor currently uses ARM processors to build a commercial cloud. Although in July last year, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard, Canonical and other OpenStack members announced their intention to develop an ARM-based cloud, the only product currently on the market is the OpenStack Essex available on the ARM sandbox via TryStack.

In addition, the remaining doubts include whether ARM servers support specific workloads in the data center or whether they can truly replace the x86 architecture. ARM is well-suited for web-scale applications and data analytics, but it remains to be seen how the value of more commonly used enterprise workloads and common cloud services remains to be seen.

The last challenge is the personality of data center buyers who are usually conservative and fickle and do not want any risk to exist. Not only do they need to be familiar with ARM technologies and vendors, they need to be familiar with the potential needs of multiple architectures to support their data centers.

2014 will be a year for ARM, business and cloud opportunities. Although the problems and challenges still exist, it will be worth the wait.