5 ms·

You seem very insightful on this topic. May I ask your opinion as to why ARM is taking off on the server market?

tremon 3y ago
Is it? FAFAIK, the only places where ARM servers run is inside Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and they design their own processors for that. The reason they chose ARM has to do with licensing, it has little to do with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
  This isn't my area of expertise, I'm sure others on here can rattle off more names, but at the very least Oracle has ARM servers available (the free ones are decent for hobby stuff) and Hetzner has ARM servers available
- lallysingh 3y ago
  AWS and other cloud providers are major, major, major buyers. They have a lot of influence in the CPU market. ARM is cheaper and the performance hit is smaller than the savings. For scalable workloads you can easily just run more ARM and save money. Also, a lot (lot) of workloads are memory or I/O bound so the performance hit is negligible. ARM has gotten pretty optimized in both the CPU architecture and the tooling thanks to mobile uses.
  - RedShift1 3y ago
    Is ARM cheaper? A few weeks ago I needed a small VM in the Google Cloud and the smallest ARM machine cost the same as the smallest x86 machine.
    - __d 3y ago
      It's not cheaper for you, it's cheaper for them.
    - acdha 3y ago
      On AWS it’s like a 20-30% discount - effectively free money for services like RDS, ElastiCache, and often Lambda or even ECS where the effort is either minimal or extremely low.
    - dixie_land 3y ago
      I am not nearly as knowledgeable as many of the commenters here on the hardware, but I do have first hand experiences running ARM on production at scale. What AWS offers and what Google offers are not even close: on AWS, our workloads actually perform better (as in, higher QPS/core, resulting in fewer pods/instances), in addition to being more cost effective (both in terms of per-instance price to begging with, and less instances in total, due to aforementioned higher QPS/core serving same amount of total requests). For the limited ARM offer from Google we tested, the performance is worse than equivalent x86 instances, in addition to no price incentives.
- usr1106 3y ago
  Exactly. The year of the ARM server has been predicted for more than 10 years. (Only topped by the year of the Linux desktop, but the latter has probably just been a joke most of the time anyway.)
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    The year of the linux desktop has been such a long prevailing joke that when the Linux desktop took over the education market nobody paid attention and people keep making YOTLD jokes.
    - icelancer 3y ago
      I think about this from time to time. The Linux desktop is actually here in huge sectors of the market and no one cares. They displaced Apple in education due to expense and Apple finally hitting escape velocity (and thus can price their goods at whatever they want), so you see a ton of Ubuntu/Mint/etc desktop cheap machines in schools that run web browsers and OpenOffice (but mostly the former). It's pretty funny.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    ARM server has a niche. If Gravitron/Ampere is good enough for your use case and you care about cost they seem like a good deal. AMD/Intel are trying to directly compete with them now with Genoa and Sapphire Rapids.
- spockz 3y ago
  Hetzner also has ARM servers you can order. Also on GCS: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compute https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compu...
- qwytw 3y ago
  Microsoft is using Ampere chips and Ampere has some other clients like Oracle, Hetzner etc. you can use their servers inhouse too. > with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance. Why did AMD introduce Genoa and Intel is developing equivalent products too? There is market for CPUs with a very high number of low-powers cores and it seems ARM had an advantage there. Even now the price per core (which are good enough for many applications) for Ampere/Gravitron cores is significantly lower.
hakfoo 3y ago
My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks. When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to stick to whatever hardware is explicitly supported. And the vendors are going to be narrow there. Fewer platforms keep support costs down, and prevent exposure to uncompetitive corners of the market. As long as $expensive_product is only officially supported for x86, nobody needs to know it's riotously unperformant on ARM in ways that will require wholesale rewrites to fix. When it's all open stuff, nothing stops people from compiling it for ARM, RISC-V, and hell 65C816, letting the market choose which platform fits their needs best. For many audiences it might not be "maximum performance under cost-no-object hardware"; it might be "what's the cheapest way to serve a fixed N workload units per month, when you include the purchase cost, electricity cost, rack-space rental cost, etc." As a second-order effect, I expect removing license cost from the equation also impacts the metrics people care about. When the software price is the dominant aspect of the bill, nobody's going to make much of a case of "we can save 55 of the annual cost up front by using cheaper good-enough hardware" or "we'll save 1% per month on the energy bill".
- acdha 3y ago
  I’d also add automation becoming pervasive, especially after containers showed up. In the 90s, people bought relatively few expensive servers and ran a ton of stuff on them, almost always hand-rolled (yes, there wren a few crazies running BCFG, cfengine, etc. but that was uncommon outside of a few niches). That meant you couldn’t migrate easily since mapping out dependencies was non-trivial and your admins didn’t want / have time to deal with portability issues. As you mentioned, open source took a lot of that away (no more dealing with bizarre vendor compiler bugs or broken tool chains) and repeatable more isolated builds and deployments made it a lot more realistic to use a different server class where it saved money.
candiddevmike 3y ago
ARM servers can be made relatively cheaply (especially if you own an ARM server company like AWS), and they use less power (and cooling, I believe). So in a data center they're cheaper for the same functionality, kinda.
ksec 3y ago
Not OP. And frankly speaking what he said should be common knowledge for those who lived through that period. AArch64 and AMD64 has more in common than Itanium which is a bag of hurt from hardware to compiler. ARM on Server actually saves money at the scale being deployed, while Itanium has zero cost advantage, and that is before adding the cost of software which was order of magnitude worst than any estimate had made at the time. Most Server software operate on Open Source software. From Linux to Nginx, MySQL, Postgres, Memcache or Redis and tons and tons OSS. Which makes changes far easier than waiting for vendor to support AArch64. AArach64 has a much bigger market to fine tune its software stack and toolchain from Smartphones. There are currently 4.5+Billion of Smartphone in uses, that is larger than all the x86 usage in the world. Compare that to IA64 /Itanium.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  To add to this, the IA64 required specialist knowledge to get to run efficiently, given that you've just spent a huge amount on new hardware, you also had to port your stuff to take advantage of the new arch. From what I recall, x86 emulation was there, but just really slow. So for a few HPC type things, it was an a leap forward, for everything else, it sucked. It was like the arm based windows surface laptops a few years ago. Lots of promise, none of the software that you actually wanted. When you looked at the opteron which was 64 bit, run faster, cheaper than the intel and could run vanilla 32bit apps without any changes faster than before, it was a no brainer.
jmyeet 3y ago
None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened. Many people don’t realize ARM can trace its origins back to the BBC Micro. For a variety of reasons it found a niche in low power applications, even 30+ years ago. ARM, the company, simply sells licenses without producing its own silicon. There’s concern now with it going public that it will seek revenue by jacking up licensing costs. It’s mobile devices where ARM flourished and entered public consciousness. There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision. ARM processors got sufficiently powerful to be in servers and power efficiency became a big deal. Google really transformed this space with sub-1.1 PUEs when no one outside even believed that was possible. Performance per Watt became a really big deal. Also, I’m not sure if this is entirely fair but I credit Apple with a lot of ARM’s success. They bought a company called PA Semi and pushed the envelope with what ARM can do. I think that may have been the best $400 million (IIRC) ever spent.
- tssva 3y ago
  "There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision." This makes it sound as if xscale was an alternative platform to ARM. Intel xscale cores implemented the ARMv5 isa.
kalleboo 3y ago
ARM allows anyone to license their cores and make their own CPUs. x86 has been limited to Intel and AMD. (before x86 took over there WAS a huge variety of CPU architectures in servers - Alpha, SPARC, HP-PA, POWER etc) Starting a CPU company and selling CPUs to customers has always been difficult since you need to compete with other CPU packagers and Intel had the largest scale so could always put you out of business if you became a threat. With the rise of big cloud server giants (AWS, Azure, Google), they can license the cores from ARM, build their own CPUs and cut out the middle-man. They are their own CPU customers so don't have to worry about building a market. It's the rise of vertical integration from tech giants.
demondemidi 3y ago
Architecture doesn’t matter as much in the cloud. If the backend servers are running storage, kv store, load balancers, etc it doesn’t matter if it is arm or x86. Arm is lower power so you can cram more compute into the same 480V chassis. If architecture doesn’t matter and density improves at lower cost , there’s an opportunity for arm to swoop in. If ampere executes to plan they will succeed where cavium failed.

Is it? FAFAIK, the only places where ARM servers run is inside Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and they design their own processors for that. The reason they chose ARM has to do with licensing, it has little to do with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance.

0xDEADFED5 3y ago
This isn't my area of expertise, I'm sure others on here can rattle off more names, but at the very least Oracle has ARM servers available (the free ones are decent for hobby stuff) and Hetzner has ARM servers available
lallysingh 3y ago
AWS and other cloud providers are major, major, major buyers. They have a lot of influence in the CPU market. ARM is cheaper and the performance hit is smaller than the savings. For scalable workloads you can easily just run more ARM and save money. Also, a lot (lot) of workloads are memory or I/O bound so the performance hit is negligible. ARM has gotten pretty optimized in both the CPU architecture and the tooling thanks to mobile uses.
- RedShift1 3y ago
  Is ARM cheaper? A few weeks ago I needed a small VM in the Google Cloud and the smallest ARM machine cost the same as the smallest x86 machine.
  - __d 3y ago
    It's not cheaper for you, it's cheaper for them.
  - acdha 3y ago
    On AWS it’s like a 20-30% discount - effectively free money for services like RDS, ElastiCache, and often Lambda or even ECS where the effort is either minimal or extremely low.
  - dixie_land 3y ago
    I am not nearly as knowledgeable as many of the commenters here on the hardware, but I do have first hand experiences running ARM on production at scale. What AWS offers and what Google offers are not even close: on AWS, our workloads actually perform better (as in, higher QPS/core, resulting in fewer pods/instances), in addition to being more cost effective (both in terms of per-instance price to begging with, and less instances in total, due to aforementioned higher QPS/core serving same amount of total requests). For the limited ARM offer from Google we tested, the performance is worse than equivalent x86 instances, in addition to no price incentives.
usr1106 3y ago
Exactly. The year of the ARM server has been predicted for more than 10 years. (Only topped by the year of the Linux desktop, but the latter has probably just been a joke most of the time anyway.)
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  The year of the linux desktop has been such a long prevailing joke that when the Linux desktop took over the education market nobody paid attention and people keep making YOTLD jokes.
  - icelancer 3y ago
    I think about this from time to time. The Linux desktop is actually here in huge sectors of the market and no one cares. They displaced Apple in education due to expense and Apple finally hitting escape velocity (and thus can price their goods at whatever they want), so you see a ton of Ubuntu/Mint/etc desktop cheap machines in schools that run web browsers and OpenOffice (but mostly the former). It's pretty funny.
- qwytw 3y ago
  ARM server has a niche. If Gravitron/Ampere is good enough for your use case and you care about cost they seem like a good deal. AMD/Intel are trying to directly compete with them now with Genoa and Sapphire Rapids.
spockz 3y ago
Hetzner also has ARM servers you can order. Also on GCS: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compute https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compu...
qwytw 3y ago
Microsoft is using Ampere chips and Ampere has some other clients like Oracle, Hetzner etc. you can use their servers inhouse too. > with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance. Why did AMD introduce Genoa and Intel is developing equivalent products too? There is market for CPUs with a very high number of low-powers cores and it seems ARM had an advantage there. Even now the price per core (which are good enough for many applications) for Ampere/Gravitron cores is significantly lower.

hakfoo 3y ago

My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks. When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to stick to whatever hardware is explicitly supported. And the vendors are going to be narrow there. Fewer platforms keep support costs down, and prevent exposure to uncompetitive corners of the market. As long as $expensive_product is only officially supported for x86, nobody needs to know it's riotously unperformant on ARM in ways that will require wholesale rewrites to fix. When it's all open stuff, nothing stops people from compiling it for ARM, RISC-V, and hell 65C816, letting the market choose which platform fits their needs best. For many audiences it might not be "maximum performance under cost-no-object hardware"; it might be "what's the cheapest way to serve a fixed N workload units per month, when you include the purchase cost, electricity cost, rack-space rental cost, etc." As a second-order effect, I expect removing license cost from the equation also impacts the metrics people care about. When the software price is the dominant aspect of the bill, nobody's going to make much of a case of "we can save 55 of the annual cost up front by using cheaper good-enough hardware" or "we'll save 1% per month on the energy bill".

acdha 3y ago
I’d also add automation becoming pervasive, especially after containers showed up. In the 90s, people bought relatively few expensive servers and ran a ton of stuff on them, almost always hand-rolled (yes, there wren a few crazies running BCFG, cfengine, etc. but that was uncommon outside of a few niches). That meant you couldn’t migrate easily since mapping out dependencies was non-trivial and your admins didn’t want / have time to deal with portability issues. As you mentioned, open source took a lot of that away (no more dealing with bizarre vendor compiler bugs or broken tool chains) and repeatable more isolated builds and deployments made it a lot more realistic to use a different server class where it saved money.

candiddevmike 3y ago

ARM servers can be made relatively cheaply (especially if you own an ARM server company like AWS), and they use less power (and cooling, I believe). So in a data center they're cheaper for the same functionality, kinda.

ksec 3y ago

Not OP. And frankly speaking what he said should be common knowledge for those who lived through that period. AArch64 and AMD64 has more in common than Itanium which is a bag of hurt from hardware to compiler. ARM on Server actually saves money at the scale being deployed, while Itanium has zero cost advantage, and that is before adding the cost of software which was order of magnitude worst than any estimate had made at the time. Most Server software operate on Open Source software. From Linux to Nginx, MySQL, Postgres, Memcache or Redis and tons and tons OSS. Which makes changes far easier than waiting for vendor to support AArch64. AArach64 has a much bigger market to fine tune its software stack and toolchain from Smartphones. There are currently 4.5+Billion of Smartphone in uses, that is larger than all the x86 usage in the world. Compare that to IA64 /Itanium.

KaiserPro 3y ago
To add to this, the IA64 required specialist knowledge to get to run efficiently, given that you've just spent a huge amount on new hardware, you also had to port your stuff to take advantage of the new arch. From what I recall, x86 emulation was there, but just really slow. So for a few HPC type things, it was an a leap forward, for everything else, it sucked. It was like the arm based windows surface laptops a few years ago. Lots of promise, none of the software that you actually wanted. When you looked at the opteron which was 64 bit, run faster, cheaper than the intel and could run vanilla 32bit apps without any changes faster than before, it was a no brainer.

jmyeet 3y ago

None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened. Many people don’t realize ARM can trace its origins back to the BBC Micro. For a variety of reasons it found a niche in low power applications, even 30+ years ago. ARM, the company, simply sells licenses without producing its own silicon. There’s concern now with it going public that it will seek revenue by jacking up licensing costs. It’s mobile devices where ARM flourished and entered public consciousness. There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision. ARM processors got sufficiently powerful to be in servers and power efficiency became a big deal. Google really transformed this space with sub-1.1 PUEs when no one outside even believed that was possible. Performance per Watt became a really big deal. Also, I’m not sure if this is entirely fair but I credit Apple with a lot of ARM’s success. They bought a company called PA Semi and pushed the envelope with what ARM can do. I think that may have been the best $400 million (IIRC) ever spent.

tssva 3y ago
"There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision." This makes it sound as if xscale was an alternative platform to ARM. Intel xscale cores implemented the ARMv5 isa.

kalleboo 3y ago

ARM allows anyone to license their cores and make their own CPUs. x86 has been limited to Intel and AMD. (before x86 took over there WAS a huge variety of CPU architectures in servers - Alpha, SPARC, HP-PA, POWER etc) Starting a CPU company and selling CPUs to customers has always been difficult since you need to compete with other CPU packagers and Intel had the largest scale so could always put you out of business if you became a threat. With the rise of big cloud server giants (AWS, Azure, Google), they can license the cores from ARM, build their own CPUs and cut out the middle-man. They are their own CPU customers so don't have to worry about building a market. It's the rise of vertical integration from tech giants.

demondemidi 3y ago

Architecture doesn’t matter as much in the cloud. If the backend servers are running storage, kv store, load balancers, etc it doesn’t matter if it is arm or x86. Arm is lower power so you can cram more compute into the same 480V chassis. If architecture doesn’t matter and density improves at lower cost , there’s an opportunity for arm to swoop in. If ampere executes to plan they will succeed where cavium failed.