Calxeda boasts of 5 watt ARM server node
Includes memory and interconnect fabric
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How does a server node including a processor, memory, and fabric interconnect that only consumes 5 watts under load grab you? How about 120 server nodes in a 2U chassis?
ARM server chip startup Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, is lifting the veil a bit on its future processors, which are in development now. Calxeda is attending the GigaOM Big Data 2011 conference in New York next week and wants to start building momentum for its future chips, which it hopes server makers will pick up and make into servers in the coming years. Calxeda announced its name change and some vague information about its chips back at the SC10 supercomputer conference in November, and told El Reg it was working on a "server on a chip" design that would result in an ARM server being half the cost of an x64 box, with it using one-10th the energy and occupying one-10th the space.
Karl Freund, the vice president of marketing at Calxeda who came on board from IBM's System z mainframe division last year and who has done marketing for Hewlett-Packard workstations, Cray Research supercomputers – and IBM Unix boxes before that – tells el Reg that the Calxeda design is a bit different from the future server chips that are expected with the Cortex-A15 processors from ARM Holdings. It is also different from the variants that ARM licensees are expected to bring to the market in 2013 or so. Freund says Calxeda can't wait that long, and more importantly, that there is no reason to.
This kind of talk is what you would expect from Barry Evans, Calxeda's CEO, and co-founders Larry Wikelius and David Borland. Evans ran Intel's low-power x86 and Xscale ARM RISC chip businesses, while Wikelius designed chips and servers at Newisys and Borland has designed chips of various sorts for Marvell, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices.
In August 2010, Calxeda had raised $48m in funding from ARM Holdings, Advanced Technology Investment Company (AMD's fab partner), Texas Instruments, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners. True to the David-versus-Goliath image of its original name, Calxeda definitely wants to throw stones, and especially at people who live in glass houses.
The precise feeds and speeds of the Calxeda chips are still not known, but Freund knows from his days of marketing Power systems at Big Blue that putting out some details can prep a market for consumption – as IBM most certainly did in the two years before its dual-core Power4 chips hit the market in the autumn of 2001. That Power4 chip and its successors turned IBM from a joke in the Unix server business to the dominant Unix system supplier a decade later.
"Anybody with a few million dollars can produce an ARM chip. So what makes us different?" Freund asks.
Not the core, that's for sure. Calxeda is starting with the Cortex-A9 core, which is the current 32-bit part that can be licensed from ARM Holdings. (You can license the 40-bit, virtualization-assisted Cortex-A15 part from ARM Holdings, too, but that won't be a production product for another two years or so.)
"What you don't want to do with a server chip is build your first product on a technology that is not proven yet," says Freund. "You have to wait for the design to settle down, as the Cortex-A9 has. If you're out on the front end of things, you can get into trouble."
Freund confirmed to El Reg that Calxeda is working on a quad-core Cortex-A9 processor with an integrated DDR3 memory controller and a homegrown fabric interconnect for the chips. The A9 core has integer and floating point units as well as a DDR2 memory controller and an L2 cache controller that can span from 128 KB to 8 MB, depending on what you want. Calxeda is adding DDR3 controllers and an unknown amount of cache. ARM Holdings' whitepaper on the Cortex-A9 chips suggests that L1 caches be set at 32 KB for instructions and 64 KB for data for networking and home gateways, with anywhere from 512 KB to 2 MB for L2 cache shared by the cores, and this is likely to be the shape of Calxeda's server chip. It is not clear if Calxeda will leave in the Media Processing Engine (MPE), but it seems likely that the floating point units will stay. Calxeda is putting a DDR3 memory controller on the chip for sure, and will be supporting ECC memory, of course, because this is a server, not a PC or tablet.
COMMENTS
@dr jim, assumptions in your post
Firstly you are assuming that everybody's workload consist of VMs. That is not universally the case. Plenty of workloads out there would fully saturate the CPU power of these A9s. That's when the performance per Watt is heavily in ARM's favour. Secondly it would be odd if this proposed system relied on external switches. I anticipate something along the lines of VXS or OpenVPX ie internal interconnect switching.
And on the topic of virtualisation I suggest you mug up on the ARM A15 which does support virtualisation and it's only a matter of time before that gets OS support (if it's not already there). Then there will be nothing left for intel to brag about except for outright performance per thread. But the supercomputer boys seem to prefer AMD for that. And on that topic I think AMD should license ARM cores sooner rather than later.
Eh, quad cores, remember?
So you would only need 24 ARM chips in your example, ie. just 100W. Typical SoCs are $20-$40, so $125 is unreasonably high. More likely it would be around $60 per chip, so the CPU cost would be $1440. Aggregate performance of 96 ARM cores would be many times that of a dual core Westmere, even more so as you avoid the overheads of virtualization. So even in your unlikely comparison there is at least an order of magnitude improvement in overall efficiency: half the cost, similar power, 5-10x the performance per virtual machine.
Olé!
Intel are behaving like an old matador who is gradually realising that they've used up their last trick, and that the new bulls (with an ARM banners fluttering from their horns) are turning out to be unexpectedly hard to deceive.
Intel really are running out of time, and if they don't do something dramatic very quickly they might suddenly find themselves with a much reduced server market. Power consumption is rapidly becoming hugely important in the server world, and so far Atom doesn't appear to make the grade. ARM based chips are clearly quite capable - the performance of mobile devices is ample demonstration of that - so why stick to x86?
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