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[Slightly offtopic] Since you seem to have lots of experience (and numerous ARM boards), I'm curious if you've had a chance to try Applied Micro's 64-bit ARM SO

[Slightly offtopic] Since you seem to have lots of experience (and numerous ARM boards), I'm curious if you've had a chance to try Applied Micro's 64-bit ARM SOC[0]? I realize it's $1500, but that's probably to reduce support costs and qualify potential customers. Anyway, it would be nice to know from a first-hand source. [0]https://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-c1-development-kits/x-c1-development-kit-basic/ https://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-c1-...

rwmj 11y ago
We've been using these at Red Hat for 18 months+ and after an initial rough start, they are now our workhorse machines for aarch64 development (I've got one under my desk). They are 8 core (plus 1 x 32 bit management core), come with 8, 16 or 32 GB of RAM, UEFI firmware, ACPI and other enterprise features. They're nice and fast for development work. Largely, the hardware and firmware bugs have now all been resolved or worked around. Downsides: No wake-on-LAN. No IPMI. (Both rumoured to exist in the management core, but I've not worked out how to enable either). The 10 Gb ethernet doesn't work for me. I don't have a monitor plugged into mine, but that's OK since I only care about serial access for ARM server hardware. Mine is noisy because of the numerous, loud fans. I disabled all the case fans, but haven't had the balls to disable the processor fan which still makes a racket. For virt development, OpenStack and that kind of thing, they're the only [aarch64] game in town. In summary, they work well.
- narrowrail 11y ago
  Thanks for the run-down, esp. the mention of the CPU fan, as I had noticed it in one of the photos. I'd be interested in reducing clock speed in the hope that I could get rid of all the fans (maybe use a heatsink?). The available RAM and lack of GPU are major benefits, and I hope we see more products with those features. Cavium seem like they could offer something similar, but I don't think their sales model fits with widespread availability of dev kits. Edit: Their site and sales sheet have a discrepancy about power supply. Does the dev kit come with one, and what are the specs? Thanks again!
  - rwmj 11y ago
    There's a photo of mine on this page (on the left): https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/raise-the-itanic/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/raise-the-itanic/ The machine is physically a standard 19" 1U rack case, half depth (or less?). It comes with an 80W PSU and a single SATA HDD. I fitted mine with a second SDD (I believe there are 4 SATA ports on the motherboard, but not enough room in the case for 4 hard drives). The motherboard inside is pretty tiny, about 7"x7". Red Hat have some Caviums and Seattles as well, but I've not used those. Edit: I forgot an important point: The upstream kernel works out of the box. (For x86 users, this will sound like a strange thing to point out, but it's BIG news in the ARM world).

rwmj 11y ago

We've been using these at Red Hat for 18 months+ and after an initial rough start, they are now our workhorse machines for aarch64 development (I've got one under my desk). They are 8 core (plus 1 x 32 bit management core), come with 8, 16 or 32 GB of RAM, UEFI firmware, ACPI and other enterprise features. They're nice and fast for development work. Largely, the hardware and firmware bugs have now all been resolved or worked around. Downsides: No wake-on-LAN. No IPMI. (Both rumoured to exist in the management core, but I've not worked out how to enable either). The 10 Gb ethernet doesn't work for me. I don't have a monitor plugged into mine, but that's OK since I only care about serial access for ARM server hardware. Mine is noisy because of the numerous, loud fans. I disabled all the case fans, but haven't had the balls to disable the processor fan which still makes a racket. For virt development, OpenStack and that kind of thing, they're the only [aarch64] game in town. In summary, they work well.

narrowrail 11y ago
Thanks for the run-down, esp. the mention of the CPU fan, as I had noticed it in one of the photos. I'd be interested in reducing clock speed in the hope that I could get rid of all the fans (maybe use a heatsink?). The available RAM and lack of GPU are major benefits, and I hope we see more products with those features. Cavium seem like they could offer something similar, but I don't think their sales model fits with widespread availability of dev kits. Edit: Their site and sales sheet have a discrepancy about power supply. Does the dev kit come with one, and what are the specs? Thanks again!
- rwmj 11y ago
  There's a photo of mine on this page (on the left): https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/raise-the-itanic/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/raise-the-itanic/ The machine is physically a standard 19" 1U rack case, half depth (or less?). It comes with an 80W PSU and a single SATA HDD. I fitted mine with a second SDD (I believe there are 4 SATA ports on the motherboard, but not enough room in the case for 4 hard drives). The motherboard inside is pretty tiny, about 7"x7". Red Hat have some Caviums and Seattles as well, but I've not used those. Edit: I forgot an important point: The upstream kernel works out of the box. (For x86 users, this will sound like a strange thing to point out, but it's BIG news in the ARM world).