3 ms·

$750, right on SolidRun’s website. Given the specs it’s a fair price, although a 8-core Ryzen CPU would indeed run circles around 16 Cortex A72 cores.

rjsw 6y ago
The $750 is for one board, the case in the article holds two of them.
dragontamer 6y ago
1U rack-form cases are pretty expensive actually. That's really the main issue with racks: you spend a substantial amount of money on just the form factor. 1U is very small: so the fans are moving fast and are very loud. Its a form-factor specifically designed for server rooms: where you put ear-plugs in before entering the room. The money spent on the racks / physical infrastructure is small compared to the ongoing costs of actually powering or cooling the room
- snuxoll 6y ago
  The $750 is just for the board. Four SFP+ ports, some onboard SATA ports, an open PCIe 3.0 x8 port and a 16-core Cortex A72 CPU on a mini-itx compatible board is still a decent price given it's not a mass-market product. Hell, development kits for many ARM SOCs cost more than that for way less. That said, you are absolutely correct that rackmount equipment is expensive by it's form-factor - but given this is a mini-itx board clearly not designed for use in a rackmounted chassis (given clearance for CPU cooling and orientation of the memory modules) it's not a factor here.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Absolutely agreed. Not just that but 1U servers also use a fair percentage of their wattage moving air with 40mm fans. The hotter the TDP of all the electronics in your server is, the more air you need to move. 40x28mm high RPM 12VDC fans are quite inefficient in terms of a ratio of cubic meters of air moved per hour vs their watt-hours consumed. In a 2U chassis if you can find a way to pack in multiple motherboards and use 60mm height fans the possible efficiencies are much greater. If you look at the 'wall of fans' in the center of something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them. Additionally a stack of 30 or 40 1U servers each with its own discrete 110-240VAC input, DC output power supply is quite inefficient in large numbers. A fair bit of wattage is wasted to spinning the 40mm fan in the power supply and in the densely packed AC to DC conversion circuitry. This is one reason why things like the FB Open Compute platform servers are sometimes 1.5RU high (so they can use 60mm fans), and use a single large AC-to-DC power supply that can take in 277VAC (or even 480VAC!), and output 12VDC to 48VDC to each motherboard in the same rack cabinet.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    In general, 1U and even 2U seems very dense to me. I think that 4U is the typical density that a typical office building could support. Even 1-node in 2U is definitely getting into 220V dedicated outlets and dedicated buildings. 1U or 1/2U per node certainly exists, but you need to start spending a good amount of thought on power and cooling to actually support that kind of infrastructure. ----------- > If you look at the 'wall of fans' in something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them. That's possibly an advantage here. ARM's are known for lower power consumption, so maybe the fans can run slower (and therefore draw less power). I'd have to think about these specs more though... A 2-node x 1U ARM server might work out if these ARM servers have very low power requirements in a very strong "horizontal scale-out" kind of setup. But its still hard for me to think exactly what the use case would be. An I/O based server would probably be better in 4U: for 50 to 100 Hard Drives on a beefier 4U Xeon or 4U EPYC chassis. So its one of those "what's the use" products. Under typical circumstances, a 2U or 4U beefy server split up into multiple VMs probably is a superior architecture. But having more "tiny" physical machines that are mostly independent (maybe sharing a PSU, but otherwise a fully independent node) for "bare metal hosting" has some benefits over VMs. I mean... do you want a single dual-socket 128-core EPYC in 4U or do you want 8x16 ARMs in 1/2U each. I dunno, I think the 128-core dual-socket 4U EPYC is gonna be better for cooling, power, and VM-flexibility. At least, that's my instinct. Unless you know that you absolutely want individual non-VM nodes. ------ EDIT: The I/O options discussed here are exceptional. If low CPU-power but high I/O is needed (more SPF+ ports or whatever), then that's probably the ARM's advantage over a single dual-socket EPYC system. EDIT2: 16x A72 seems weak. But 10Gbps SFP+ x4? That's... actually really really good. Might be hell to actually write software that takes advantage of all that bandwidth though.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      The part with four 10Gbps ports is nice. I wish there were more mini-itx x86-64 server boards with such. The vast majority of mini-itx boards are not designed for front-to-back server airflow, and are intended/marketed more for consumer enthusiast small gaming PCs and stuff. Ordinarily in a x86-64 intel or AMD chipset server if you wanted 4 x 10Gbps SFP+, in addition to whatever NICs are on the motherboard, you'll end up using one of the Intel chipset, low-profile PCI-Express interface cards in a slot. Using some 1U long depth Dells as an example you might get a motherboard that has 2 x 1000BaseT and 2 x 10GbE SFP+ in daughtercard plugged into the motherboard, and then you'd have two or three low-profile PCIE slots to add more NICs. Or some combination like one full-height size PCIE slot and one low profile slot.
linux4kix 6y ago
Remember the HoneyComb is a 30 Watt machine.

rjsw 6y ago

The $750 is for one board, the case in the article holds two of them.

dragontamer 6y ago

1U rack-form cases are pretty expensive actually. That's really the main issue with racks: you spend a substantial amount of money on just the form factor. 1U is very small: so the fans are moving fast and are very loud. Its a form-factor specifically designed for server rooms: where you put ear-plugs in before entering the room. The money spent on the racks / physical infrastructure is small compared to the ongoing costs of actually powering or cooling the room

snuxoll 6y ago
The $750 is just for the board. Four SFP+ ports, some onboard SATA ports, an open PCIe 3.0 x8 port and a 16-core Cortex A72 CPU on a mini-itx compatible board is still a decent price given it's not a mass-market product. Hell, development kits for many ARM SOCs cost more than that for way less. That said, you are absolutely correct that rackmount equipment is expensive by it's form-factor - but given this is a mini-itx board clearly not designed for use in a rackmounted chassis (given clearance for CPU cooling and orientation of the memory modules) it's not a factor here.
walrus01 6y ago
Absolutely agreed. Not just that but 1U servers also use a fair percentage of their wattage moving air with 40mm fans. The hotter the TDP of all the electronics in your server is, the more air you need to move. 40x28mm high RPM 12VDC fans are quite inefficient in terms of a ratio of cubic meters of air moved per hour vs their watt-hours consumed. In a 2U chassis if you can find a way to pack in multiple motherboards and use 60mm height fans the possible efficiencies are much greater. If you look at the 'wall of fans' in the center of something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them. Additionally a stack of 30 or 40 1U servers each with its own discrete 110-240VAC input, DC output power supply is quite inefficient in large numbers. A fair bit of wattage is wasted to spinning the 40mm fan in the power supply and in the densely packed AC to DC conversion circuitry. This is one reason why things like the FB Open Compute platform servers are sometimes 1.5RU high (so they can use 60mm fans), and use a single large AC-to-DC power supply that can take in 277VAC (or even 480VAC!), and output 12VDC to 48VDC to each motherboard in the same rack cabinet.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  In general, 1U and even 2U seems very dense to me. I think that 4U is the typical density that a typical office building could support. Even 1-node in 2U is definitely getting into 220V dedicated outlets and dedicated buildings. 1U or 1/2U per node certainly exists, but you need to start spending a good amount of thought on power and cooling to actually support that kind of infrastructure. ----------- > If you look at the 'wall of fans' in something like a Dell 1U dual socket system, there's eight or ten fans each of which if running at full speed can be an 8W to 10W load. This is necessary because you might have two 120W TDP CPUs under passive heatsinks that need a LOT of air pushed past them. That's possibly an advantage here. ARM's are known for lower power consumption, so maybe the fans can run slower (and therefore draw less power). I'd have to think about these specs more though... A 2-node x 1U ARM server might work out if these ARM servers have very low power requirements in a very strong "horizontal scale-out" kind of setup. But its still hard for me to think exactly what the use case would be. An I/O based server would probably be better in 4U: for 50 to 100 Hard Drives on a beefier 4U Xeon or 4U EPYC chassis. So its one of those "what's the use" products. Under typical circumstances, a 2U or 4U beefy server split up into multiple VMs probably is a superior architecture. But having more "tiny" physical machines that are mostly independent (maybe sharing a PSU, but otherwise a fully independent node) for "bare metal hosting" has some benefits over VMs. I mean... do you want a single dual-socket 128-core EPYC in 4U or do you want 8x16 ARMs in 1/2U each. I dunno, I think the 128-core dual-socket 4U EPYC is gonna be better for cooling, power, and VM-flexibility. At least, that's my instinct. Unless you know that you absolutely want individual non-VM nodes. ------ EDIT: The I/O options discussed here are exceptional. If low CPU-power but high I/O is needed (more SPF+ ports or whatever), then that's probably the ARM's advantage over a single dual-socket EPYC system. EDIT2: 16x A72 seems weak. But 10Gbps SFP+ x4? That's... actually really really good. Might be hell to actually write software that takes advantage of all that bandwidth though.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    The part with four 10Gbps ports is nice. I wish there were more mini-itx x86-64 server boards with such. The vast majority of mini-itx boards are not designed for front-to-back server airflow, and are intended/marketed more for consumer enthusiast small gaming PCs and stuff. Ordinarily in a x86-64 intel or AMD chipset server if you wanted 4 x 10Gbps SFP+, in addition to whatever NICs are on the motherboard, you'll end up using one of the Intel chipset, low-profile PCI-Express interface cards in a slot. Using some 1U long depth Dells as an example you might get a motherboard that has 2 x 1000BaseT and 2 x 10GbE SFP+ in daughtercard plugged into the motherboard, and then you'd have two or three low-profile PCIE slots to add more NICs. Or some combination like one full-height size PCIE slot and one low profile slot.

linux4kix 6y ago

Remember the HoneyComb is a 30 Watt machine.