4 ms·

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 cur

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
        [deleted]
      - dragontamer 12y ago
        If you're talking motherboard + processor... They'd have to do better than that to beat Intel Atom. http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-MB4696/Supermicro_A1SAM-2750F_uATX_Intel_Atom_C2750_20W_8-core_System-on-Chip?gclid=CJ-8toDm7b8CFcZQ7AodaywAdw http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-MB46... Oct-core Atom, Integrated IPMI, 4xGBe ports for $360. And since it is an x86 platform, you don't have any software migration issues.
        wmf 12y ago
        That's my point of comparison. Best case, if Seattle can be slightly faster than Avoton with better I/O and the customers get high on ARM hype, AMD could charge at most the same price as Avoton. Most likely it will be cheaper.
    - Symmetry 12y ago
      It's not a solid price, I don't think I've ever seen a dev board for less than 5X the price of a product.
- jondtaylor 12y ago
  I assume compression will be used for http content for serving content. I wouldn't be surprised if they include a few algorithms. This is a dev kit not a commercial offering...
wmf 12y ago
Hardware gzip is definitely a thing; Intel calls it QuickAssist and a bunch of IBM systems have it.
- twotwotwo 12y ago
  Huh, yeah--here's their whitepaper: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/solution-briefs/accelerating-hadoop-applications-brief.pdf http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/... Of course they'll tend to pick cases where it helps a lot, but they claimed 50% wall time and 25% power savings on a Hadoop job, and they emulate the zlib API. If I'm reading right this was with a Sandy Bridge-based Xeon; time saved by the coprocessor could be greater when the CPU is slower. Really interesting--thanks for the pointer.
rsync 12y ago
Hardware compression is very interesting for ZFS.

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
      [deleted]
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      If you're talking motherboard + processor... They'd have to do better than that to beat Intel Atom. http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-MB4696/Supermicro_A1SAM-2750F_uATX_Intel_Atom_C2750_20W_8-core_System-on-Chip?gclid=CJ-8toDm7b8CFcZQ7AodaywAdw http://www.serversdirect.com/Components/Motherboards/id-MB46... Oct-core Atom, Integrated IPMI, 4xGBe ports for $360. And since it is an x86 platform, you don't have any software migration issues.
      - wmf 12y ago
        That's my point of comparison. Best case, if Seattle can be slightly faster than Avoton with better I/O and the customers get high on ARM hype, AMD could charge at most the same price as Avoton. Most likely it will be cheaper.
  - Symmetry 12y ago
    It's not a solid price, I don't think I've ever seen a dev board for less than 5X the price of a product.
jondtaylor 12y ago
I assume compression will be used for http content for serving content. I wouldn't be surprised if they include a few algorithms. This is a dev kit not a commercial offering...

wmf 12y ago

Hardware gzip is definitely a thing; Intel calls it QuickAssist and a bunch of IBM systems have it.

twotwotwo 12y ago
Huh, yeah--here's their whitepaper: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/solution-briefs/accelerating-hadoop-applications-brief.pdf http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/... Of course they'll tend to pick cases where it helps a lot, but they claimed 50% wall time and 25% power savings on a Hadoop job, and they emulate the zlib API. If I'm reading right this was with a Sandy Bridge-based Xeon; time saved by the coprocessor could be greater when the CPU is slower. Really interesting--thanks for the pointer.

rsync 12y ago

Hardware compression is very interesting for ZFS.