Micro server market ARM and its partners still need to work hard

With the advent of the era of cloud computing and big data, data centers are looking for ways to efficiently handle a large number of parallelized and lightweight loads with lower power consumption. These types of loads Perhaps not demanding on the computational power of a single server node, but more on I / O and parallelism. In this trend, ARM architecture into the data center market.

Enterprise users have tried to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server to support this kind of application load. However, the current hardware platform has more or less impact on the operation of this kind of load after the virtualization As the costs do not meet their needs very well, the industry has specifically tailored these needs to develop miniature servers in the form of physical nodes with high density and low power consumption that deliver the right performance.

Currently, the micro-server market has two major camps: Intel and ARM ecosystem. Intel's main is the Atom chip, the advantage is that there are plenty of performance, and can be used to create different SoC, and as early as 2012, released a model that supports 64-bit technology. ARM's advantage lies in the open chip IP authorizations, Applied Micro, http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/2039.html "ARM and Marvell and AMD and other vendors on the basis of their own R & D and design chips And micro-server, more customized advantages.

Although it is thrilling that ARM marches into the mini-server market to challenge Intel's news, the ARM ecosystem is not perfect either technically or strategically. The first generation of HP MoonShot server equipped with Atom chip rather than the ARM architecture chip fact, there is a general manager of the ARM architecture server camp Calxeda is not ready to die first mortal news, all show ARM in the data center application too early. More serious than the delay in the hardware products and technology from the software aspects - At present, most of the data center software is built on Intel's x86 architecture, users want to switch to ARM embrace, you have to rewrite or Replace the existing software stack.

Currently, there are still some obstacles in the application of ARM in the data center. First of all, the current ARM is based on only 32-bit architecture, but now most of the server applications have turned 64-bit, such as Hadoop, 32-bit ARM has lagged behind the times. ARM lacks software vendor support and although ARM already supports Linux systems, there is limited support for applications. ARM also lack excellent memory controller and cache coherency features, performance is low, it is difficult to deal with the mainstream server applications.

In order to improve the ARM ecosystem, AMD actively partners, launched a comprehensive development platform for 64-bit ARM server CPU design. AMD Greater China Marketing, Senior Product Marketing Manager Liang Hongwei said that with an x86 architecture to meet all the business has been unrealistic, and the future is the coexistence of x86 and ARM era. Liang Hongwei said AMD believes that from 2014 to 2016 will be the construction and growth of the ARM ecosystem. AMD will officially launch the industry's first 64-bit ARM-based server processor, code-named Seattle, in the fourth quarter of this year.

In addition, AMD is one of the earliest founding members of the Server Base System Architecture. SBSA is designed to solve the problem of inconsistent hardware and software standards for ARM architecture servers. It is run by hardware companies such as ARM, AMD, Dell, HP, and Canonical, Citrix, Linaro, Microsoft, Red Hat, SUSE and other software companies and organizations initiated by the norms of the norms, the advent of this specification ARM server development process easier to accelerate the ARM server from the chip, software to the end product deployment process, but also makes the operation System vendors and ISVs can more easily roll out ARM server solutions.

The introduction of the SBSA standard will help to improve the ARM ecosystem. We see participating vendors encompassing server hardware and software vendors, which is good news for the ARM ecosystem. The purpose of the SBSA specification is to define basic requirements for ARM SoCs and to help third-party vendors design and manufacture ARM processor-based server products. SBSA also specifies the ports between ARM servers for balancing workloads and other underlying interfaces.

So, ARM and his little friends, the next most fundamental task is still to continue to hurry to improve the performance of their own micro-server products, power than the advantages. This task is not easy to accomplish, because Intel never like any other strong contempt for their opponents, nor wait for others to catch up with the habit. Just as AMD released news that Q2 samples of 64-bit ARM chips will be available in Q4 and massively listed in the fourth quarter, Intel is already preparing to launch Denverton, the next generation of Atom server SoC chips during the year, which is 14nm Chip.