server News - Page 25 of 26 - CNX Software

June 19, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

ARM vs x86 Servers Benchmark – Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 vs Intel Xeon E3-1240

Calxeda has released the results of ApacheBench benchmark comparing their ARM-based EnergyCore solution to an Intel Xeon server in order to showcase the performance and the much lower power consumption of their servers. Here’s the setup: Hardware: Single Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 @ 1.1 GHz, 4 GB of DDR3L-1066 memory, 1Gb Ethernet network port and 250 GB SATA 7200rpm HDD Intel Xeon E3-1240 @ 3.3 GHz, 16 GB memory and 1Gb Ethernet network port. No info on hard drive provided Software: Ubuntu Server v12.04 Apache Server v2.4.2 ApacheBench v2.3 (16k request size) They performed power measurements every 2 seconds and averaged the results. Power supply overhead and hard drive power consumption were not excluded in the measurement, but the entire SoC and DDR memory power consumption were included together. For the Intel server however, they could not measure directly, so they used published TDP values for the CPU (80 W) and I/O […]

June 6, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Mitac Unveils ARM Based GFX Server at Computex 2012

MiTAC International announced their first ARM server (MiTAC GFX) based on Marvell ARMADA XP SoC and running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS at Computex 2012, in Taipei. This solution appears to be similar to Dell “Copper” ARM server announced last week, which also uses Marvel ARMADA XP and runs Ubuntu 12.04, except its intended to be a real product rather than just a prototype. The MiTAC GFX with ASX-1 module is intended for deployment as a general purpose server where real estate, efficiency and throughput at a realistic price are key factors and typical applications include web hosting, web browsing, email, chat, social media and networking, etc. Later, MiTAC will introduce an ASX-HP (High Performance) module for compute intensive workloads that can be add to GFX system, and ASX modules featuring 64-bit SoC are under development. MiTAC showcased a GFX System with 64 nodes (that’s 256 Cortex A9 cores) at Computex 2012, […]

May 30, 2012May 30, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Dell Announces Copper ARM Servers Based on Marvell ARMADA XP SoC

It looks like 2012 will be the year of ARM servers. After previous announcements of ARM servers based on Calxeda and Applied Micro SoC, Dell has just announced its own “Copper” ARM servers powered by Marvell ARMADA XP SoC (MV78460) that allegedly runs Ubuntu Server with a LAMP stack. Dell “Copper” ARM server is composed of 12 sleds with 4 SoC each slotted into a 3U C5000 Chassis. Here are the specs: Form factor 3U chassis 48 independent servers Architecture 1S 1.6GHz, quadcore Marvell Armada XP system on a chip (SoC) 4 discrete server nodes per sled 12 sleds per 3U chassis Memory 1 DIMM slot DDR3 UDIMM VLP, 1333MHz up to 8GB per node Drive bays 1 x 2.5″ SATA per node Hard disk drives 2.5″ SATA (7.2K rpm) Networking 1GB Marvell Ethernet uplink per node (QSGMII) connected to Marvell Integrated L2 Switch (98DX4122) Dell believes that ARM based […]

May 15, 2012May 22, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Intel Roadmap to 2015 and Beyond: 5nm Technology, Merrifield Mobile Processor, Microservers and More

Intel had their annual Investor meeting day on the 10th of May 2012 in Santa Clara where we would learn a few things about what’s ahead for Intel and the semiconductor industry. Paul Otellini, Intel President and Chief Executive Officer, started the meeting by giving some numbers about Intel results and showing opportunities existing for cloud and data center, personal computing, mobile devices and intelligent systems (for automotive, retail and communications markets). One interesting point was the tremendous growth in data Intel expects from 2,500 Exabytes per year (7 EB/day) today to 8,000 Exabytes by 2015 which the majority of the growth lead by Big data. He also boasted about Intel technology advantage. For example, Intel introduced High-K Metal Gate technology in 2007 and competitor only got it in products last year (btw Samsung Exynos 5 uses HKMG). They recently introduced Tri-gate technology and they only expect competitors to catch […]

May 8, 2012May 8, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

This is What a Calxeda 192-Core ARM Ubuntu 12.04 Server Looks Like

Last November, Calxeda announced its 32-bit ARM Chip for servers, and now there are been some good progress as Calxeda is currently showcasing a 192-core ARM Server running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server edition at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California. The server showcased has 192 cores (48 Calxeda EnergyCore quad core Cortex-A9 processors), consumes less than 300 Watts, supports up to 24 SATA drivers and runs Ubuntu 12.04 with OpenStack’s cloud management infrastructure. Karl Freund, Calxeda Vice President of Marketing said that the Calxeda server is running “a standard LAMP stack (running Calxeda’s website) along with other popular web frameworks such as node.js and Ruby on Rails, provisioning of OpenStack Nova compute instances, and even Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Service bare-metal provisioning.” The company also explained that a complete native build of the Ubuntu 12.04 kernel took less than an hour to build on a single node, 4 times faster than the […]

April 28, 2012April 28, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

AppliedMicro Unveils ARMv8 64-bit Apache 2 Implementation for X-Gene SoC

Last year, Applied Micro announced their Gene-X 64-bit ARMv8 core at ARM Techcon 2011, and showed a minimal demo based on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA booting Linux ARM 64-bit to the command line. Since then, the company has made progress and just announced the availability of an Apache 2 web server implementation on their 64-bit ARMv8 X-Gene Server-on-Chip. This is the very first implementation of a fully-functional server platform running a real-world application on 64-bit ARM-based processor, said Vinay Ravuri, Vice President and General Manager of Processor Products at AppliedMicro. The platform is now capable of running a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software stack. Back in 2011, the company announced ARMv8 support for Linux would be developed by Redhat and be available in Fedora. This 64-bit ARM web server implementation enable OEMs, ODMs, Cloud Service Providers, Independent Software Vendors and other development partners to conduct early stage performance benchmarking and […]

January 25, 2012January 25, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

The Past, Present and Future of Ubuntu for ARM

David Mandala of Canonical talked at Linux.Conf.Au on 18th of January 2012 about Ubuntu for ARM and the move from netbook to server support. You can read my notes below, or jump at the end of this post to watch the presentation. The Past 2008: Ubuntu decides to only support ARMv7 architecture vs. Debian that supports ARMv4 and above. 2009: Ubuntu release for Freescale i.MX51 (ARMv5 built), and then Marvell ARMAVA with ARMv6 and VFP (ARM floating point unit) support. 2010: April (10.04) The first ARMv7 release for OMAP3 (Beagleboard) with VFP, Thunb2, NEON and SMP for ARM and first netbook edition October (10.10) Pandabord (OMAP4) release with initial device tree support for ARM. Starts work with Linaro. 2011: 11.04 (5th release) – Supports OMAP3 and OMAP4 only. The netbook edition is using Qt, further improvement to device tree, further work with linaro and on the way to the Unified […]

November 4, 2011November 4, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Pandaboard Cloud Cluster Running Google App Engine

Noritsuna Imamura showed an ARM cloud cluster built with 6 Pandaboards at Linaro Connect Q4.11. Noritsuna is a member of the Open Embedded Software Foundation (OESF), a Japanese organization that support Open Source embedded software. The cluster is made of 6 panda boards with a total 6 GB of RAM (1GB per board) that runs the Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/) in Ubuntu/Linaro 11.09 release. The middleware used is TyphoonAE, a full-featured and productive serving environment to run Google App Engine (Python) applications. This type of server hosts web applications such as Rietveld (used in the demo below) to be run on (thin) clients. There are also plenty of other software (required by Google App Engine) that runs in this ARM cloud such as MySQL, Apache2, memcached and more. In the video, a power meter shows that the cluster consumes about 35 W in low activity mode. Norisuna had a comparison […]