Red Hat push 64-bit ARM Server Partner Program

"Tenkine Server channel September 15" Red Hat announces a new partner Program for 64 arm hardware data center vendors, further promising to strengthen support for ARM processor-based architecture servers. Red Hat provides partners in the program with the tools, resources, and support needed to build a common development platform to help partners accelerate the development of a 64-bit ARM solution based on Red Hat technology. The goal of this program is to provide trial Red Hat 64-bit ARM software for members joining the program, and to collaborate in standardizing server software and application development platforms that support multiple hardware designs.

Red Hat Arm Partners early use (Early Access) program Target customers are chip manufacturers and server manufacturers, the initial membership includes AMD, Anglo Megatrends, Appliedmicro, Bo Tong, Cavium, Dell, HP, Linaro and arm holding company themselves.

For hardware manufacturers, it is generally believed that arm's main selling point is not its unit watt performance, but arm flexibility. ARM's unit watt performance is good indeed, but Intel is likely to catch up soon. Chip makers value arm's flexibility, because the chip maker can let go of the license agreement for the ARM processor kernel and combine arm with other required components, so that server OEMs can choose a multitude of components.

But arm's use in the data center is a major obstacle, because the chip manufacturers have autofrettaged design chips, different manufacturers of arm SOC There are some subtle incompatibilities, so the software vendors have to target each product to make some changes to the code. The result is a fragmented ecosystem that is hard to get support from Open-source projects such as Linux.

Recently, ARM proposed a 64-bit http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13453.html ">arm Server SOC interoperability standard designed to repair fragmented ecosystems." Red Hat is one of the companies involved in the development of this standard, and the other companies involved are AMD, Bo Tong and Linaro, among others. Red Hat is highly likely to provide some information on early work on this standard to companies participating in the early use plan of the Red Hat arm partner.

Into the 3721.html ">2014 year, arm of the 64-frame structure for the chip manufacturers focus. ARM has launched its own 64-bit ARM Reference Architecture, which is cortex-a57, A53 architecture. But the market response is not strong enough. So AMD came forward, announcing the launch of the 64-bit ARM computing architecture. And another arm chip manufacturer Appliedmicro announced its X-gene 2 and X-gene 3 Arm server chip details, Appliedmicro the first generation of 64-bit X-gene low-power arm chip will be used at the end of 2014 for the server. Appliedmicro has a first-hand advantage, that is, the company is the only one based on fully customized nuclear development 64-bit ARM processor, other companies are using existing ARM processors, such as ARM's CORTEX-A57 processor.

Currently, there are two main camps in the micro-server market: Intel and arm ecosystems. Intel's main force is the Atom chip, which has the advantage of robust performance and can be used to build different Soc, and has been released in 2012 to support 64-bit technology models. ARM's advantage is to open the chip IP authorization, applied Micro, Marvell and AMD and other arm manufacturers can be based on their own research and development and design chip and micro-server, more customized advantages.

While Arm's foray into the micro-server market is exciting to challenge Intel's news, the arm ecosystem is not perfect either technically or strategically. The first generation of HP Moonshot server with the atom chip rather than the ARM architecture chip, but also with the ARM Architecture Server Camp General Calxeda The first dead message, no one does not show arm in the data center application is still too early. The more serious scenario is the software link than the delay in the hardware product and technology-most of the data center software is built on Intel's x86 architecture, and users will have to rewrite or replace the existing software stack if they want to switch to arm's arms.

So in order to solve the current dilemma, the SBSA specification (Server Base System architecture) is introduced. SBSA is to solve the ARM architecture server hardware and software standards of the problem, by arm, AMD, Dell, HP and other hardware companies, as well as canonical, Citrix, Linaro, Microsoft, Red Hat, SuSE and other software companies and organizations launched by the infrastructure specification, The advent of this specification makes the ARM server development process simpler, accelerate the arm server from the chip, software to the end of the product deployment process, but also make the operating system vendors and ISVs easier to launch the ARM server solution.

The introduction of SBSA standards will help arm the ecological circle of perfection, we see the participation in the development of manufacturers covered by the server hardware and software vendors, which for the construction of arm ecosystem is a good news. The purpose of the SBSA specification is to define basic requirements for ARM Soc, and to help third party vendors design and manufacture server products based on ARM processors. SBSA also provides the ports and other underlying interfaces that are used to balance workloads between arm servers.

So, arm and his little friends, the next most fundamental task is still to continue to move forward, improve their micro-server products performance Power ratio advantage. This task is not easy to accomplish, because Intel has never despised its opponents as much as the other strong, nor has it waited for others to catch up.