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Is Facebook Planning a Move to ARM Based Servers?
- justincormack 13y agoThe proposed applications (network control plane) don't correspond to what you would write in PHP (the main Facebook app). The arm64 stuff on the other hand is looming like being the first new RISC architecture since er alpha and there may well be a move towards using it. There was a story recently that Google has an ARM license too.
- salient 13y agoSo is Google: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull-designing-chips-in-threat-to-intel.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull...
- kintamanimatt 13y agoWhy ARM? What are the benefits of ARM compared to other architectures? Are there drawbacks to the architecture?
- salient 13y agoFor the same reason Apple is making its own custom ARM CPU right now - it can be highly integrated with whatever they want it to be, and it has exactly what they need, and none of the stuff they don't need. You can build solutions that are much more custom with ARM.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoIsn't it cheaper just to use a general purpose CPU than design and fabricate a custom one?
- gaius 13y agoAt a given volume, a custom CPU is a commodity CPU.
- wiremine 13y agoWhat volume is that for the type of ARM chip Facebook might be using?
- gaius 13y agoGoogle is reckoned to have about 2 million servers[1] and they're probably dual- or quad-processor. I guess FB have ambitions at that scale. The expensive bit of running a datacentre is power, both for the machines themselves, and for cooling, and these are linked. For every Watt you put in in electricity, you have to take it out again as heat. It costs more than the real estate and more than payroll. Savings here can add up very quickly. [1] https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13ttdlibtq5tjv5e04cdnrqhoj1jzbzhr00k https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13ttdlibtq5tjv5e04...
- wlievens 13y agoIt doesn't take that many devices too offset design cost.
- gaius 13y agoWell that's not a property of ARM the CPU but ARM the business model (IP licensing). And ARM aren't the only player in this space, there is also MIPS (and others).
- stusmall 13y agoOpenSPARC is another one in this space. I was working on a wifi daughter board for a project a while ago that had a SPARC at its heart. It really made sense for them. They were already in the business of fabing their own complicated ICs, they didn't need a really power CPU and power wasn't a huge concern to them. So they got a pretty decent CPU with mature tooling without the licensing to ARM. These are only my guesses at their logic though. I was just an outsider looking in at a closed black box.
- salient 13y agoARM has the momentum, compared to MIPS.
- gaius 13y agoSure, but there was a time that MIPS was in some of the most powerful machines in the world, from workstations to supercomputers. Things can change pretty fast in this industry.
- stusmall 13y agoWhile ARM has a lot more momentum I wouldn't completely discount MIPS. They are still out there and churning away in places you wouldn't expect. If I remember correctly the PIC32 is nothing but a modified MIPS core.
- nate_meurer 13y agoIn addition, China has staked its domestic chip design efforts on MIPS64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
- 13y ago
- porsupah 13y agoAs above; ARM grew from a very low-power beginning (some 250mW total for the original ARM-2 chipset of CPU, IOC, MEMC, and VIDC, running at 8MHz on 2 micron tech, in 1989), and has remained low-power since. Whilst the CPU’s obviously only a part of any server, I’d imagine that the savings in power usage across as many servers as companies like Google and Facebook have are the driving force behind these evaluations.
- twotwotwo 13y agoMaybe for things like photo storage, where CPU speed isn't that important. Baidu is already using ARM servers for cloud storage.
- tdmackey 13y agoThey've been hiring for this for a while now, https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=engineering&req=a0IA0000006cPTMMA2 https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=engineering...
- cordite 13y agoDidn't HP consider making blade like units with up to 20 servers per unit? I saw that they canceled that due to some deal with Intel.