3 ms·
As far as I can work out from the details released so far, this is basically a standard backplane for "blade" (or microserver as they are now known) servers, ba
by justincormack 14y ago
As far as I can work out from the details released so far, this is basically a standard backplane for "blade" (or microserver as they are now known) servers, based on PCIe x8 so it is simple and cheap, which just happens to be more of less what Calxeda was using anyway.
I can't work out yet if there is a standard way of attaching RAM as well I don;t think so (yet).
It has taken an open source project to make blade servers standardised by the look of it, should make the whole ecosystem much cheaper than the proprietary systems.
It is not actually clear if Facebook has committed to ARM, although it would not surprise me if they use some. But they have the option.
- wmf 14y agoEach microserver has SO-DIMM slots for RAM. Although this project is vaguely similar to blades, it isn't hot-swap, it can't hold 2S/4S servers, and it's not clear how I/O consolidation will work. So it's pretty different from existing blades.
- justincormack 14y agoHot swap would not be that hard to add to pcie but I don't think they care. Sure there is ram per soc but the discussion implied they wanted to break it up more longer term...