[juhygtfghjk]

Even if MSFT ever sell an ARM port of Windows Server and if you are running big server tasks (Oracle, SQLServer, IIS)etc then you will still need Intel for the horsepower.

If the servers are just low power, high efficiency file servers then every NAS already uses an ARM core to run Samba

[jws]

Assuming the ARM servers can beat Intel in "work per joule", which I think they will, then they can win in what is now the VPS space.

I use virtual private servers from three different vendors for a number of projects, and they make a lot of sense from the cost standpoint, but they have a huge drawback that you are sharing resources with others and their workloads impact your abilities (plus any one of them could be a vector to introduce a hypervisor exploit and compromise the system). I'd much rather have a small computer to myself.

Imagine a 1U system[1] with 32 independent 1GHz ARM servers[2]. That hits about the same power use as a modern intel machine, has an amazing memory bandwidth by comparison, and if you rent them out for ~$8/month each (smallest slices available now) it is a money farm.

Systems like this will also work for problems that scale laterally. Pushing that a bit, imagine if a CDN vendor started putting racks of these at their strategic locations, you could improve your application's response time by hosting nearby, handling locally what you can, and bundling the heavy lifting back to your big servers in an efficient way.

[1] Or 2U if space isn't at a premium. They are easier to cool. [2] Disks go elsewhere, say across a 1gbps ethernet switch to a SAN. Build in the switches and you don't need the magnetics for the ethernet, there are clever capacitive solutions.

[patrickgzill]

Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of RAM.

[lsc]

ayup. I've looked into renting out small ARM servers rather than VPSs, and the biggest thing stopping me is that the ram is not socketed, and all the boards I can get are made for client boxes (e.g. not enough ram, and too much video hardware driving up the cost.) I mean, in the hosting industry, we expect to pay off our hardware in something like four months, and unless you are a lot better at marketing than I am, it's difficult to charge a whole lot more than $20 per gigabyte of ram per month, so the total cost for the unit (including cpu and disk) has to be around $80 for every gigabyte of ram or so. right now, the panda board looks like the best choice, and even before disk you are looking at almost $200 for something with a power supply, etc..

Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)

If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved. (Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without ECC.)

But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource contention problems that come with virtualization.

[wmf]

That has nothing to do with the core, so there's no reason why an ARM server couldn't support the same capacity.

[luu]

That's exactly what people used to say about x86, with some combination of IBM, DEC, Data General, Control Data, HP (PA-RISC), SGI (MIPS), Sun (SPARC), etc. substituted for Intel.

[wriq]

"...Project Denver where they are building high-performance ARM-based CPUs, designed to power systems ranging from “personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers”."...

It looks like there targeting everything from mobile devices to the datacenter. I wouldn't be surprised to see ARM server's running 'big server tasks'. ARM is a huge threat to Intel and the potential power savings in big datacenters should add up to quite a bit.

[yason]

I could imagine there could easily be a big array of ARM cpus on the server system; not a single one that is on par with Intel's fastest chips but they come in huge numbers and are presumably much cheaper.

And it seems that since they will integrate their GPU on the same die then it could provide massive parallel computing power as well via Cuda.

[timthorn]

I get your point re:SQL Server & Oracle (though not for all DBMS types) - but why do you need horsepower to serve web pages?