46 ms·

AMD Announces the Availability of 64-bit ARM Opteron Developer Kits

67 points by timthorn 12y ago

tormeh 12y ago
Why Fedora?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  As opposed to...? ARM Opteron development kits are targeted at server- notice the Opteron moniker- which means RedHat is a natural partner, and Fedora is RedHat's testing OS. (Why not an old stable OS? Because ARM64 is brand-new)
  - tormeh 12y ago
    I was thinking Red Hat, but I suppose that's not out yet for ARM64.
    - rch 12y ago
      Plus, Fedora is exactly what you would want in a dev kit if you intend to target RHEL down the road.
    - Alupis 12y ago
      Red Hat tests new things in Fedora before they move into RHEL/CentOS. This makes Fedora a fantastic development platform as well as a "preview" of what may be coming in the future RHEL/CentOS releases.
    - rwmj 12y ago
      It's been in the works for a long time, but was announced yesterday: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140730005126/en/Red-Hat-Launches-ARM-Partner-Early-Access http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140730005126/en/Red-...
- Alupis 12y ago
  Because Fedora is a great development platform -- and is used much more than you would think. And it's backed by Red Hat -- which caters to the server market first and foremost. This seems a natural fit.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Fedora is a rolling distro so your packages are normally always very up to day unlike debian which can have long package freezes. Fedora doesn't use the libre kernel like debian Fedora is commonly the 'test bed' of things for red hat. Fedora is to Red Hat, what Sid is to Debian stable.
SoapSeller 12y ago
It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so they have to produce processors based on ARM designs. I'm really hoping that someone will compete with Intel on the high-end CPUs, maybe IBM's PowerPC?
- Alupis 12y ago
  It's not that they can't/won't compete (actually, when it comes to large scale virtualization, a 16 or 32 core Opteron is much more preferable over an 4 core or 8 core Xeon, and it's less expensive sometimes too). AMD is seeing the writing on the wall -- ARM is coming into the server market in a big way. It's way better power consumption to performance ratio. You can pack a lot more cores into a server and still consume less power, and at scale, they can compete with traditional dual CPU x86 machines. They are also cheaper to manufacture and purchase. A great many server companies are getting into ARM -- most notably HP. AMD has said this is a move for the 2016 market (at the earliest). I think it's the right move and welcome it.
  - jandrewrogers 12y ago
    It really depends on the workload. For some use cases like databases or analytics, ARM is often less efficient than the latest Intel chip almost anyway you measure it. The increased operational throughput per CPU, which can be integer factors, offsets any differences in cost or power consumption. ARM's sweet spot has traditionally been for CPUs that are otherwise going to be underutilized, saving both power and CPU costs in those circumstances. As cloud platforms become better at ensuring maximum utilization of CPUs, and a larger portion of workloads become throughput intensive, it moves things a bit more in Intel's direction. ARM will probably find a better market in the Internet of Things than in the data center.
    - sounds 12y ago
      If that's true, not only is AMD wrong, so are all the other "datacenter ARM" entrants: HP, Dell, and Samsung to name a few. It's also unwise to cite the companies who tried and went bust (like Calxeda) since the tech is still very early. A large entrant may be able to establish a niche some time before a startup could do the same.
twotwotwo 12y ago
It's a footnote to the larger thing, but it mentions "compression and crypto co-processors". I'm familiar with hardware crypto acceleration, but I'm sort of curious about the compression part--is it gzip or one of the fast algos like Snappy/LZO/LZ4 or something proprietary? How fast? Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  I doubt that it can keep up with the Intel AES-instructions on a Xeon. Maybe for like... $1000... AMD would have a solid offering. But $3000 for this? Really?
  - dman 12y ago
    Its a devkit.
  - bio4m 12y ago
    Its a dev board; not really something you'd use in production. Its a small run of reference hardware for devs to get started on; by the time its ready for release OEM's will have much more affordable kit for end users to buy.
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      It'd be nice to have an idea of how affordable it would get. For now, the $3000 dev kit is the only solid price we can work with...
      - wmf 12y ago
        For the motherboard+processor I would predict at most $200 for the quad core and $350 for the 8-core version.
        deleted 12y ago
dragontamer 12y ago
$3000 for a single server? Erm... a good Xeon Dell with Dual 10GBe extension is $2000... and the Xeon can scale up basically indefinitely. Don't believe me? Go configure a Dell R220 Poweredge with Dual-10GBe ports. Its only $2,021.37. Hopefully, the real hardware will be significantly cheaper. AMD has an issue competing against itself (ie: Opteron 4360), let alone against Intel if these are the prices they're looking for.
- dman 12y ago
  This is a development kit.
api 12y ago
Naming it Opteron is horribly confusing... is it x86 or ARM?
- dragontamer 12y ago
  Opteron A-series is ARM. The pure numbers (ie: Opteron 4360) are x86. Also, expect more AMD marketing gaffs. They fired a good chunk of their marketing team a year ago when they were downsizing. AMD got good stuff coming IMO, but they are billions of $$ in debt and have been operating at a loss for a few years.
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >>Opteron A-series is ARM. That's pretty stupid considering all A-series APUs they've been selling for a few years now.
  - Shorel 12y ago
    It should have been OpterARM
mark3mark 12y ago
Is this fedora devkit the same as what Red Hat just announced as "ARM Partner Early Access Program for Partner Ecosystem"? http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-hat-launches-arm-partner-early-access-program-for-partner-ecosystem http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-ha...
- rwmj 12y ago
  No. The Red Hat announcement is a variant of RHEL. However you can just run Fedora 21 on ARM64 -- I'm running it on my dev machine (which is not AMD, but X-Gene based). Linux arm64.home.annexia.org 3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj4.fc22.aarch64 #1 SMP Mon Jul 28 13:50:24 BST 2014 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
penglish1 12y ago
Finally, an ARM platform with ECC support. Well, and reasonable performance networking one presumes. And PCI-Express! I think ARM has a lot of potential in the "smartphone priced" server market, particularly in an age where physical isolation (vs VMs or containers) and legal ownership of the server might theoretically provide some advantages against state surveillance. At least post-facto in the sense of "one could conceivably build a lawsuit on this" vs. "now I need DigitalOcean/Amazon/Google to sue the govt for me."
- stephencanon 12y ago
  Unless I’m severely misremembering, Cortex-A8 had ECC support, and appeared ~6 years ago.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    Boston Viridis ARM server supported ECC memory. Too bad it wasn't competitively priced.
  - wmf 12y ago
    There haven't really been any usable ARM server chips. There was supposed to be the Armada XP, but by the time it came out it was obsolete. There was supposed to be Calxeda but they went out of business. Maybe the nth time's the charm.
    - penglish1 12y ago
      AMD has the size such that making it happen may be easier for them. But they are also hungry for something, anything to give them an edge against Intel. Fingers crossed.
  - penglish1 12y ago
    That may be correct, but I chose the word "platform" very carefully. Most ARM platforms to date, whether dev kits or final product have been aimed at smartphones, tablets, consumer devices (wireless routes, NAS etc) or fully embedded systems (SD cards?, hard disk controllers, etc). Apparently in those applications, nobody cares enough about ECC to bother. Well, that and the fact that the memory is soldered on in most cases and the total device cost extremely low (compared to servers). So you are expected to simply replace your system entirely in the event that there are memory errors you notice. And hopefully nothing goes wrong that you don't notice. Also, I suppose technically if you were only worried about bit flips due to solar activity, then a tiny amount of RAM on a tiny chip has less surface area and fewer bits TO flip than your standard full sized DIMM.
lsc 12y ago
I am... excited. Sadly, three grand is a lot of money for prgmr.com right now, so I'll have to consider carefully if I want to wait for production or if I want to buy a dev kit and start experimenting ahead of time, but ARM servers are something we have been talking about selling for a while. Even if their performance per watt turns out to be not as great as expected, there is a fair bit of interest in the architecture, as far as I can tell. These things look beefy enough that I might even be able to virtualize and sell Xen VMs. There is some dev work involved with that, but srn has expressed interest, so maybe .
- dragontamer 12y ago
  You run prgmr.com ?? Nice. Why Xen VMs? Isn't the Xen technology basically unproven in ARM space? I'd imagine that KVM/ARM would be the best bet.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    You can use either. Both KVM and Xen developers have had this hardware available for quite some time, and before that we'd been developing on the Foundation Model (very slow) simulator for over a year. By the time this hardware is widely available, all your favourite Linux distros will Just Work, with ~99% of the functionality/packages/languages of x86. In fact that's pretty much the case already.
  - lsc 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure Xen on ARM has been a thing longer than KVM on ARM. But in general, why Xen over KVM? the primary reason is that I understand xen better. I have a secondary reason, and it's a long-term bet against KVM. KVM has a lot of features that while they are interesting in the corporate space, make oversubscription too easy in the hosting space. Set up a KVM host with a bunch of ram and a bunch of swap, and start handing out "memory" to your kvm guests? By default it will get ram or swap as availability and usage dictate, just like any other process. To be absolutely clear, as far as I can tell, none of the current KVM VPS providers are using these over-subscription methods right now. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. However, the primary reason why Xen beat OpenVZ and the other containerization systems was that it is really quite difficult to oversubscribe ram on a Xen host, and your pagecache was in your ram. It was not shared with others. Sure, if the manager of an OpenVZ host allocates resources responsibly, it can be more efficient than Xen. And some hosts did that. But, because some hosts did not do that, Xen developed a reputation. Buy a xen host, and you are getting honest ram. Buy an OpenVZ host and you are relying on the reputation of the host. KVM, now, can be configured to run in the same way Xen is, with no sharing of memory, pagecache or otherwise. However, it is simple to give KVM guests memory that is ram /or/ swap, and other than performance, it would be impossible to tell, from the guest, what I gave you. Now, of course, right now KVM enjoys the same reputation as Xen, because all the current KVM providers seem to be doing the responsible thing and only handing out ram, not ram/swap mix, but at some point? someone is going to change that. The irritating thing is that the xen developers seem to be running as hard as they can to put in kvm-stlye features to share more memory. Isolation, when you are in a multi-tenant environment, is often more important than overall efficiency.
carlsborg 12y ago
"The whole thing has an expected power usage of 25W." - from an Ars article from Jan this year. On the desktop front, the recent Kaveri A10s (low cost quad core CPUs with built-in Radeon R7 graphics) coupled with 2.4Ghz memory gives very playable frame rates for almost all the big releases.
rdl 12y ago
Seems like a bad idea to price your dev kit this high. If I were in AMD's position, I'd heavily subsidize the dev kits -- maybe $500-1000 -- to try to get people to build on my platform. At $3k, it's only going to be appealing to hardware OEMs or big teams. At $500, random people within companies would buy them (i.e. me), or people might get them for personal projects. The idea of something with working TrustZones (vs. the abortion which is TCG/TPM) is intriguing, on top of ARM power savings.
- mcpherrinm 12y ago
  You don't want a devkit like this to be popular. These surely aren't ramped up on a full production line, more likely being made in prototype houses that can't handle the volume, and have extensive testing of each unit. You need to get the OEMs and big teams on board first, and can get the developer-centric experimental products out later.

67 points by timthorn 12y ago

tormeh 12y ago

Why Fedora?

sliverstorm 12y ago
As opposed to...? ARM Opteron development kits are targeted at server- notice the Opteron moniker- which means RedHat is a natural partner, and Fedora is RedHat's testing OS. (Why not an old stable OS? Because ARM64 is brand-new)
- tormeh 12y ago
  I was thinking Red Hat, but I suppose that's not out yet for ARM64.
  - rch 12y ago
    Plus, Fedora is exactly what you would want in a dev kit if you intend to target RHEL down the road.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    Red Hat tests new things in Fedora before they move into RHEL/CentOS. This makes Fedora a fantastic development platform as well as a "preview" of what may be coming in the future RHEL/CentOS releases.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    It's been in the works for a long time, but was announced yesterday: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140730005126/en/Red-Hat-Launches-ARM-Partner-Early-Access http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140730005126/en/Red-...
Alupis 12y ago
Because Fedora is a great development platform -- and is used much more than you would think. And it's backed by Red Hat -- which caters to the server market first and foremost. This seems a natural fit.
valarauca1 12y ago
Fedora is a rolling distro so your packages are normally always very up to day unlike debian which can have long package freezes. Fedora doesn't use the libre kernel like debian Fedora is commonly the 'test bed' of things for red hat. Fedora is to Red Hat, what Sid is to Debian stable.

SoapSeller 12y ago

It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so they have to produce processors based on ARM designs. I'm really hoping that someone will compete with Intel on the high-end CPUs, maybe IBM's PowerPC?

Alupis 12y ago
It's not that they can't/won't compete (actually, when it comes to large scale virtualization, a 16 or 32 core Opteron is much more preferable over an 4 core or 8 core Xeon, and it's less expensive sometimes too). AMD is seeing the writing on the wall -- ARM is coming into the server market in a big way. It's way better power consumption to performance ratio. You can pack a lot more cores into a server and still consume less power, and at scale, they can compete with traditional dual CPU x86 machines. They are also cheaper to manufacture and purchase. A great many server companies are getting into ARM -- most notably HP. AMD has said this is a move for the 2016 market (at the earliest). I think it's the right move and welcome it.
- jandrewrogers 12y ago
  It really depends on the workload. For some use cases like databases or analytics, ARM is often less efficient than the latest Intel chip almost anyway you measure it. The increased operational throughput per CPU, which can be integer factors, offsets any differences in cost or power consumption. ARM's sweet spot has traditionally been for CPUs that are otherwise going to be underutilized, saving both power and CPU costs in those circumstances. As cloud platforms become better at ensuring maximum utilization of CPUs, and a larger portion of workloads become throughput intensive, it moves things a bit more in Intel's direction. ARM will probably find a better market in the Internet of Things than in the data center.
  - sounds 12y ago
    If that's true, not only is AMD wrong, so are all the other "datacenter ARM" entrants: HP, Dell, and Samsung to name a few. It's also unwise to cite the companies who tried and went bust (like Calxeda) since the tech is still very early. A large entrant may be able to establish a niche some time before a startup could do the same.

twotwotwo 12y ago

It's a footnote to the larger thing, but it mentions "compression and crypto co-processors". I'm familiar with hardware crypto acceleration, but I'm sort of curious about the compression part--is it gzip or one of the fast algos like Snappy/LZO/LZ4 or something proprietary? How fast? Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.

dragontamer 12y ago
I doubt that it can keep up with the Intel AES-instructions on a Xeon. Maybe for like... $1000... AMD would have a solid offering. But $3000 for this? Really?
- dman 12y ago
  Its a devkit.
- bio4m 12y ago
  Its a dev board; not really something you'd use in production. Its a small run of reference hardware for devs to get started on; by the time its ready for release OEM's will have much more affordable kit for end users to buy.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    It'd be nice to have an idea of how affordable it would get. For now, the $3000 dev kit is the only solid price we can work with...
    - wmf 12y ago
      For the motherboard+processor I would predict at most $200 for the quad core and $350 for the 8-core version.
      - deleted 12y ago

dragontamer 12y ago

$3000 for a single server? Erm... a good Xeon Dell with Dual 10GBe extension is $2000... and the Xeon can scale up basically indefinitely. Don't believe me? Go configure a Dell R220 Poweredge with Dual-10GBe ports. Its only $2,021.37. Hopefully, the real hardware will be significantly cheaper. AMD has an issue competing against itself (ie: Opteron 4360), let alone against Intel if these are the prices they're looking for.

dman 12y ago
This is a development kit.

api 12y ago

Naming it Opteron is horribly confusing... is it x86 or ARM?

dragontamer 12y ago
Opteron A-series is ARM. The pure numbers (ie: Opteron 4360) are x86. Also, expect more AMD marketing gaffs. They fired a good chunk of their marketing team a year ago when they were downsizing. AMD got good stuff coming IMO, but they are billions of $$ in debt and have been operating at a loss for a few years.
- phkahler 12y ago
  >>Opteron A-series is ARM. That's pretty stupid considering all A-series APUs they've been selling for a few years now.
- Shorel 12y ago
  It should have been OpterARM

mark3mark 12y ago

Is this fedora devkit the same as what Red Hat just announced as "ARM Partner Early Access Program for Partner Ecosystem"? http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-hat-launches-arm-partner-early-access-program-for-partner-ecosystem http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/7/red-ha...

rwmj 12y ago
No. The Red Hat announcement is a variant of RHEL. However you can just run Fedora 21 on ARM64 -- I'm running it on my dev machine (which is not AMD, but X-Gene based). Linux arm64.home.annexia.org 3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj4.fc22.aarch64 #1 SMP Mon Jul 28 13:50:24 BST 2014 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

penglish1 12y ago

Finally, an ARM platform with ECC support. Well, and reasonable performance networking one presumes. And PCI-Express! I think ARM has a lot of potential in the "smartphone priced" server market, particularly in an age where physical isolation (vs VMs or containers) and legal ownership of the server might theoretically provide some advantages against state surveillance. At least post-facto in the sense of "one could conceivably build a lawsuit on this" vs. "now I need DigitalOcean/Amazon/Google to sue the govt for me."

stephencanon 12y ago
Unless I’m severely misremembering, Cortex-A8 had ECC support, and appeared ~6 years ago.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  Boston Viridis ARM server supported ECC memory. Too bad it wasn't competitively priced.
- wmf 12y ago
  There haven't really been any usable ARM server chips. There was supposed to be the Armada XP, but by the time it came out it was obsolete. There was supposed to be Calxeda but they went out of business. Maybe the nth time's the charm.
  - penglish1 12y ago
    AMD has the size such that making it happen may be easier for them. But they are also hungry for something, anything to give them an edge against Intel. Fingers crossed.
- penglish1 12y ago
  That may be correct, but I chose the word "platform" very carefully. Most ARM platforms to date, whether dev kits or final product have been aimed at smartphones, tablets, consumer devices (wireless routes, NAS etc) or fully embedded systems (SD cards?, hard disk controllers, etc). Apparently in those applications, nobody cares enough about ECC to bother. Well, that and the fact that the memory is soldered on in most cases and the total device cost extremely low (compared to servers). So you are expected to simply replace your system entirely in the event that there are memory errors you notice. And hopefully nothing goes wrong that you don't notice. Also, I suppose technically if you were only worried about bit flips due to solar activity, then a tiny amount of RAM on a tiny chip has less surface area and fewer bits TO flip than your standard full sized DIMM.

lsc 12y ago

I am... excited. Sadly, three grand is a lot of money for prgmr.com right now, so I'll have to consider carefully if I want to wait for production or if I want to buy a dev kit and start experimenting ahead of time, but ARM servers are something we have been talking about selling for a while. Even if their performance per watt turns out to be not as great as expected, there is a fair bit of interest in the architecture, as far as I can tell. These things look beefy enough that I might even be able to virtualize and sell Xen VMs. There is some dev work involved with that, but srn has expressed interest, so maybe .

dragontamer 12y ago
You run prgmr.com ?? Nice. Why Xen VMs? Isn't the Xen technology basically unproven in ARM space? I'd imagine that KVM/ARM would be the best bet.
- rwmj 12y ago
  You can use either. Both KVM and Xen developers have had this hardware available for quite some time, and before that we'd been developing on the Foundation Model (very slow) simulator for over a year. By the time this hardware is widely available, all your favourite Linux distros will Just Work, with ~99% of the functionality/packages/languages of x86. In fact that's pretty much the case already.
- lsc 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure Xen on ARM has been a thing longer than KVM on ARM. But in general, why Xen over KVM? the primary reason is that I understand xen better. I have a secondary reason, and it's a long-term bet against KVM. KVM has a lot of features that while they are interesting in the corporate space, make oversubscription too easy in the hosting space. Set up a KVM host with a bunch of ram and a bunch of swap, and start handing out "memory" to your kvm guests? By default it will get ram or swap as availability and usage dictate, just like any other process. To be absolutely clear, as far as I can tell, none of the current KVM VPS providers are using these over-subscription methods right now. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. However, the primary reason why Xen beat OpenVZ and the other containerization systems was that it is really quite difficult to oversubscribe ram on a Xen host, and your pagecache was in your ram. It was not shared with others. Sure, if the manager of an OpenVZ host allocates resources responsibly, it can be more efficient than Xen. And some hosts did that. But, because some hosts did not do that, Xen developed a reputation. Buy a xen host, and you are getting honest ram. Buy an OpenVZ host and you are relying on the reputation of the host. KVM, now, can be configured to run in the same way Xen is, with no sharing of memory, pagecache or otherwise. However, it is simple to give KVM guests memory that is ram /or/ swap, and other than performance, it would be impossible to tell, from the guest, what I gave you. Now, of course, right now KVM enjoys the same reputation as Xen, because all the current KVM providers seem to be doing the responsible thing and only handing out ram, not ram/swap mix, but at some point? someone is going to change that. The irritating thing is that the xen developers seem to be running as hard as they can to put in kvm-stlye features to share more memory. Isolation, when you are in a multi-tenant environment, is often more important than overall efficiency.

carlsborg 12y ago

"The whole thing has an expected power usage of 25W." - from an Ars article from Jan this year. On the desktop front, the recent Kaveri A10s (low cost quad core CPUs with built-in Radeon R7 graphics) coupled with 2.4Ghz memory gives very playable frame rates for almost all the big releases.

rdl 12y ago

Seems like a bad idea to price your dev kit this high. If I were in AMD's position, I'd heavily subsidize the dev kits -- maybe $500-1000 -- to try to get people to build on my platform. At $3k, it's only going to be appealing to hardware OEMs or big teams. At $500, random people within companies would buy them (i.e. me), or people might get them for personal projects. The idea of something with working TrustZones (vs. the abortion which is TCG/TPM) is intriguing, on top of ARM power savings.

mcpherrinm 12y ago
You don't want a devkit like this to be popular. These surely aren't ramped up on a full production line, more likely being made in prototype houses that can't handle the volume, and have extensive testing of each unit. You need to get the OEMs and big teams on board first, and can get the developer-centric experimental products out later.