Showing posts with label ARM server chip. Show all posts
Packet.net strong-ARMs cloud for $0.005 per core per hour
CEO
Zachary Smith told The Register that the company's cooked up the cloud for a
few reasons. Price is one: Packet will offer ARM cores at a tenth of the price
it charges for Intel cores, at US$0.50 per hour per server, or $0.005 per core
per hour. Smith thinks that will be a head-turner by itself.
Packet.net,
a bare-metal cloud aimed at developers, has flicked the switch on cloud-running
servers powered by a pair of Cavium's 48-core ARMv8-A ThunderX processors.
He
also thinks developers will appreciate the chance to try native Docker on
many-cored machines and appreciate the opportunity an ARM-powered cloud
represents as they pursue 100 per cent portable software. He believes open
source folk will see the arrival of an ARM-powered cloud as incentive to
accelerate cross-platform versions of their pet projects.
Even
ARM will benefit, he says, because having a working cloud on the market will
give both it and licensees more reason to innovate for the data centre.
ARM's
recent purchaser, SoftBank, recently tipped some money into Packet.net, but Smith
swears he's had a long-term ambition to offer an ARM-powered cloud, if only
because he enjoys having multiple ARM server CPU vendors willing to do deals.
That kind of competition is not currently possible in the x86 world, at least
until AMD returns to servers in 2017.
Smith
also feels that ARM clouds are inevitable, probably thanks to telcos looking to
offer cores to rent at the edge of their networks. The CEO feels that telcos
will build edge clouds because they're sick of over-the-top players having all
the fun and profits: this time telcos want to build a revenue-generating
platform beyond mere carriage.
For
now, Packet's ARM cloud offers 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04, but promises that CoreOS,
FreeBSD and CentOS are in the pipeline. Four different ARM server
configurations are also in the works.
The
cloud will have an API, a portal, and will also be accessible from DevOps
favourites likes Terraform and Ansible. Four of the company's bit barns – in
Parsippany New Jersey, Sunnyvale California, Amsterdam and Tokyo – will offer
the service as of Tuesday.
"We
want to offer a super-cheap, 'you would be stupid not to try it'
offering," Smith told The Register. "If we can get the open source
ecosystem rebooted, I think Intel's grip on the data centre will be
shattered." ®
STMicroelectronics is licensing the the Cortex-R5 to build (system on chips) SoCs for the automotive market.
ARM
on Tuesday announced the release of a new chip, called the Cortex-R5, that's
designed for real-time embedded systems with critical safety needs, such as
autonomous driving or surgical automation.
STMicroelectronics
is the first ARM partner to announce it's licensing the new processor to build
highly integrated SoCs for the automotive market.
The
new chip was developed to meet the requirements of the most stringent
industrial safety standards (IEC 61508 SIL 3) and automotive safety standards
(ISO 26262 ASIL D), making it easy to adopt. It also uses hardware to simplify
its integration into complex real-time software environments, as well as to
separate software tasks to protect and isolate safety-critical code. This
allows the hardware to be managed by a software hypervisor.
"The
Cortex-R52 supports our Smart Driving vision by enabling a new range of
high-performance, power-efficient SoCs for any in-vehicle application demanding
real-time operation and the highest levels of functional safety, including
powertrain, chassis and ADAS," Fabio Marchiò, Automotive Digital Division
General Manager of STMicroelectronics, said in a statement. "The
Cortex-R52's ability to compartmentalize software provides our users with the
best solution for safety without loss of determinism. Its virtualization
support simplifies the consolidation of applications and functions into a
single processor, delivering a shorter integration time."
The
new processor, the first built on the ARMv8-R architecture, comes a couple
weeks after Softbank finalized its acquisition of ARM with the intent of
pushing into the Internet of Things.
ARM's new supercomputer chip design with vector extensions will be in Japan's Post-K computer, which will be deployed in 2020
ARM
conquered the mobile market starting with Apple’s iPhone, and now wants to be
in the world’s fastest computers.
A
new ARM chip design being announced on Monday is targeted at supercomputers, a
lucrative market in which the company has no presence. ARM’s new chip design,
which has mobile origins, has extensions and tweaks to boost computing power.
The
announcement comes a few weeks after Japanese company Softbank said it would
buy ARM for a mammoth $32 billion. With the cash, ARM is expected to sharpen
its focus on servers and the internet of things.
ARM’s
new chip design will help the company on two fronts. ARM is sending a warning
to Intel, IBM and other chip makers that it too can develop fast supercomputing
chips. The company will also join a race among countries and chip makers to
build the world’s fastest computers.
The
chip design is being detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino,
California, on Monday.
Countries
like the U.S., Japan and China want to
be the first to reach the exascale computing threshold, in which a
supercomputer delivers 1 exaflop of performance (a million trillion
calculations per second). Intel, IBM and Nvidia have also been pushing the
limits of chip performance to reach that goal.
Following
Softbank’s agreement to buy ARM, it should come as no surprise that the first
supercomputer based on the new chip design will be installed in Japan. The
Post-K supercomputer will be developed by Fujitsu, which dropped a bombshell in
June when it dropped its trusty SPARC architecture in favor of ARM for
high-performance computers. Fujitsu aided ARM in the development of the new
chip.
Post-K
will be 50 to 100 times speedier than its predecessor, the K Computer, which is
currently the fifth fastest computer in the world. The K Computer delivers 10.5
petaflops of peak performance with the Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 VIIIfx
processor.
The
new ARM processor design will be based on the 64-bit ARM-v8A architecture and
have vector processing extensions called Scalable Vector Extension. Vector
processors drove early supercomputers, which then shifted over to less
expensive IBM RISC chips in the early 1990s, and on to general-purpose x86
processors, which are in most high-performance servers today.
In
2013, researchers said less expensive smartphone chips, like the ones from ARM,
would ultimately replace x86 processors in supercomputers. But history has
turned, and the growing reliance on vector processing is seeing a resurgence
with ARM’s new chip design and Intel’s Xeon Phi supercomputing chip.
The
power-efficient chip design from ARM could crank up performance while reducing
power consumption. Supercomputing speed is growing at a phenomenal rate, but
the power consumption isn’t coming down as quickly.
ARM’s
chip design will also be part of an influx of alternative chip architectures
outside x86 and IBM’s Power entering supercomputing. The world’s fastest
supercomputer called the Sunway TaihuLight has a homegrown ShenWei processor
developed by China. It offers peak performance of 125.4 petaflops.
ARM
has struggled in servers for half a decade now, and the new chip design could
give it a better chance of competing against Intel, which dominates data
centers. Large server clusters are being built for machine learning, which
could use the low-precision calculations provided by a large congregation of ARM
chips with vector extensions.
ARM
servers are already available, but aren’t being widely adopted. Dell and Lenovo
are testing ARM servers, and said they would ship products when demand grows,
which hasn’t happened yet.
ARM
server chip makers are also struggling and hanging on with the hope the market
will take off someday. AMD, which once placed its server future on ARM chips,
has reverted back to x86 chips as it re-enters servers. Qualcomm is testing its
ARM server chip with cloud developers, and won’t release a chip until the
market is viable. AppliedMicro scored a big win with Hewlett Packard
Enterprise, which is using the ARM server chips in storage systems. Other ARM
server chip makers include Broadcom and Cavium. (Know More)
