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Comment by aritmo | Hacker News Reader

What are the use-cases for such a server? It does not look good for desktop use.

Low power/high density virtualization hosting, website hosting, or even a native build server for linux arm distributions.

That's a lot of ARM64 power in one platform.

I'm not so sure. This is a company that sells sub $100 computers after all.

It depends on the type of ARM core and the manufacturing process. If it has 24 A53 cores then it wouldn't beat a 4 core desktop CPU from 2012. If it has 24 A72 cores but a manufacturing process older than 28nm then it still wouldn't be competitive with anything on 14nm or better.

The parent mentioned it would be a good server for build operations that require an ARM cpu. Perhaps you meant cross compiling on an old CPU would still be faster, but there may be demand for native ARM build machines.

A53 cores can use as little as tens of milliwatts... these aren't going to compete with Xeon or whatever high performance CPU's are being run in today's clouds... but for a static website at Wix (or whatever), you don't really need that performance majority of the time for majority of their customers.

Same goes with most long-running VPS'... bursts of activity here and there or once a day or whatever.

Being able to run those workloads on cheaper cores that consume far less power would be a huge win. Not all workloads would be a good fit, but those which are, this can be big.

They're A53 cores at 1Ghz assuming the article is right about it using the SC2A11. Multithread performance will probably be in the ballpark of a high end Android phone or a dual core laptop.

ARM has some interesting power and heat advantages over Intel/AMD at the moment. Power and Cooling make up significant costs for cloud providers (and for many companies, for that matter), especially on the cloud storage side. For a fair number of the services, particularly ones with very bursting workloads, that superior idle CPU usage, and reduced heat output is _very_ interesting. It opens up a number of possibilities where "good enough" performance is actually good enough, and the extra rack density provides some strong advantages, _particularly_ in easily parallelisable workloads (or completely independent workloads happening in parallel, for example functions as a service)

Amazon isn't just providing ARM CPU servers because of customer demand, and nor is it just to get leverage with Intel. That's not the way they tend to work. They're providing them so that they can leverage them in-house as well. Amazon just likes to take the position that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If it's good for them, there's bound to be customers that will find it good for them also, and as you sell it to customers, you get to those advantages of scale much quicker.

Cooling and power dictate just how much computation you can squeeze out of a data center. There’s even a fancy CS theorem about it. ARM really makes x86 look antiquated in this regard. I don’t think arm chips are where they need to be, yet, but the history of technology is full of this sort of thing.

Medium term, I expect Intel to look much more innovative than current. Long term, we’re either all dead because the robots won or uploaded to the cloud hive mind once our contributions to the universe outweigh our costs.

Arm has no intrinsic advantage over x86 ISA wise, for the most part. High performance arm cores consume similar energy to x86.

Not having to decode variable-length instructions is one advantage.

More cores means more flops. It’s going to take increased core “concentration” to get to exascale.

It would make a nice home file server.

ATOM series cpu will be good enough for home file server as it has lower power consumption too plus excellent kernel support.

Might be good enough... but for a fair comparison, ARM has excellent kernel support, and can sip a few milliwatts per core instead of Atom's best of 2 watts per core.

Might not make a difference if you attach them to spinning disks or something, but you can really turn the thing into a wall-plug sort of thing and never worry about it again.

if it's an idle fileserver ATOM can be put into sleeping mode most of the time, so the power saving might not be as much comparing to ARM.

if it's active 24x7, then hard-drive overshadows both ATOM and ARM CPU in terms of drawing currents.

ATOM supports multiple native SATA ports and it is still hard for ARM to catch up. Marvell is the only ARM vendor does nice ARM+SATA but its chip is hard to find, plus it is used in low-end NAS devices while ATOM is in the mid-range, it's more for the cost-saving instead of power-saving though.

I was attracted by ARM lowest-power in the last, until I realized hard-drive is the one consumes most power and ARM does not do well with non-multimedia IO.

I’m not sure these statements are true, can you please link me to some data?

WD Red 10TB maxes out around 5.7W [1] under heavy read-write activity and can use much less when idling.

Intel Atom is typically in the 20W range for the parts commonly picked for NAS solutions, but can go as low as 8W too [2] and again when idling would use less.

I don’t think they have anything <5W which would directly support your statement the HDD uses more power than the CPU.

[1] https://www.wd.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_asse... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/11144/intel-launches-16core-a...

Does it also cost the same? I know that Synology opts for ARM CPUs across their NAS line and only opts for Intel in most expensive models. Why if Atom is so good?

Atoms are expensive, compared to ARM for budget needs.

Is 24 cores really useful for a home file server?

Probably not. A home server would likely not get a high a number of simultaneous requests that can be processed in parallel. I suspect that fewer more powerful cores would lead to higher performance in that particular case.

Yes if you put your services into VMs.

If you can service fs calls on multiple cores, yes. The processing stack for a network fileysystems server is TCP or udp load, fs load and asynchronous clients. If it's just you, a couple of core does it. If it's you, your partner, a home pvr using network file streaming, kids playing music, I could believe some parallelism would help.

Big memory for zfs arc would help too.

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