I haven't used Online.net in a while but they're on Twitter, on IRC, they have a forum based on Discourse[1], now this. It's like a fresher OVH. French, too.
The servers have four logical processors like this
processor : 0
model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee fpv3 tls idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae
CPU implementer : 0x56
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x2
CPU part : 0x584
CPU revision : 2
I think the big use case for ARM in datacenters, over the next few years, is for servers whose CPU usage is very low today--they're consistently network-bound or they just act as a relatively dumb interface to RAM or disk (memcached, some distributed DBs, some dumb proxies). Baidu uses ARM for cloud storage, Facebook used AMD servers for memcached despite their lagging Intel on speed. Basically, you look elsewhere when a Xeon is too much.
Someday comes a point where apps that actually are compute-bound might want to use more, slower cores for power/density/cost/etc.--I just don't think that cutover is tomorrow for the kind of apps (most of) you or I work on.
Further out: This is a Marvell-designed core that looks slower than the Cortex-A15-based Tegra K1 in a Chromebook (posted results elsewhere in the comments; it could be a clock-speed issue, not anything inherent to the core designs). Further out, there're some 64-bit ARM cores (Cortex-A57, X-Gene, Project Denver though that may not wind up in servers) and at process bumps (like TSMC 20nm). Related, check out http://www.anandtech.com/show/8580/hp-appliedmicro-and-ti-br... if you haven't. Of course, Intel isn't sleeping, and low-power x86 chips will improve, too; there will be 14nm versions of the Atom-based Xeons someday. As ever, fun times.
I can see someone put 64, 128 of them in 1U chassis. This might be interesting low cost system for someone who need simulcast live video streams to millions of users at really low cost.
"64 4 cores CPU each with integrated 16 GIGE ports for fan out live video stream that potentially fit inside 1U chassis"
I wonder if the development of this idea will be hampered because of the ARM architecture, or if on the contrary it will boost ARM compatibility from developers. They claim they can have a better density of instances with physical ARM chips than with virtualized x64 instances, and still use less power. If this takes on it can be amazing.
For a while you could configure your account to allow DMs from people you don't follow. That was removed, but I suspect it may still exist for big companies/verified accounts.
Something that has hopefully not been overlooked for the paid version - making sure there is an ability to restart from the control panel (or whatever) - after issuing the shutdown command as root I thought refreshing the page might attempt to bring it back up but alas I was locked out for the rest of the 15 minutes.
This is really cool. The price is obviously going to be a question. The other thing I wonder is if this is more or less reliable than a VPS, in case of hardware failure.
Nope, the cloud is about automation and self-service.
If the provider tells you what you're getting you can always ignore that information if you don't care. But some customers care about hardware specifics.
$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=2000 run
sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1
Doing CPU performance benchmark
Threads started!
Done.
Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 2000
Test execution summary:
total time: 1.5297s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 1.5219
per-request statistics:
min: 0.14ms
avg: 0.15ms
max: 4.68ms
approx. 95 percentile: 0.16ms
Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10000.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 1.5219/0.00
C1
$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=2000 run
sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1
Doing CPU performance benchmark
Threads started!
Done.
Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 2000
Test execution summary:
total time: 27.0053s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 26.9926
per-request statistics:
min: 2.69ms
avg: 2.70ms
max: 2.84ms
approx. 95 percentile: 2.72ms
Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10000.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 26.9926/0.00
For comparison, Cortex-A15-based (32-bit Tegra K1) Acer Chromebook 13:
sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1
Doing CPU performance benchmark
Threads started!
Done.
Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 2000
Test execution summary:
total time: 8.8170s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 8.8083
per-request statistics:
min: 0.83ms
avg: 0.88ms
max: 21.43ms
approx. 95 percentile: 0.95ms
Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10000.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 8.8083/0.00
ubuntu@c1-10-1-18-157:~$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=2000 --num-threads=4 run
sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 4
Doing CPU performance benchmark
Threads started!
Done.
Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 2000
Test execution summary:
total time: 6.7674s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 27.0485
per-request statistics:
min: 2.69ms
avg: 2.70ms
max: 7.00ms
approx. 95 percentile: 2.70ms
Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/17.36
execution time (avg/stddev): 6.7621/0.00
Not a scientific measure by ANY measure, but a similar core I googled appears to kick out about 200 bogomips whereas a virtual Xeon E5-2690 v2 core on one of my machines knocks out 5984 bogomips.
I have 20 of those Xeon cores and 128Gb of RAM in a 2U.
Comparing the ratio of bogomips you'd have to get 598 of those ARM machines in a 2U to get the same bogomips.
Like I said this isn't even slightly scientific but is at least interesting trivia.
ARMv7 means they are probably using 32-bit Cortex A9 processors. Those are quite old, and probably on a 40nm process. The state of the art right now are these from Applied Micro:
I found other source where they said it's around 1200 bogomips for a single core. That would means that you only need 5 times more core which is far from being an issue, 100 cores, which means only 25 processors.
Yes, but considering that newer CPUs do not have increasing frequencies, I guess you are more or less doomed to scale horizontally, and not vertically anymore.
Not tried to push it but it has 20 Windows Server 2012 R2 instances running on it at the moment all with 8Gb of memory (this is overcommitted dynamic memory). Disk is on a SAN larger than my kitchen. I span up a Linux VM quickly to do a bogomips on :)
I can probably push 40 of those onto it without it bending too terribly. If I knock the RAM down to 2Gb an instance I could probably quite happily get 64-100 on it in theory. I think memory bandwidth might kill it before CPU does.
We have two almost full (18 each) 42U racks of those machines (bar switches) so across the 720 E5 cores with 4.6TiB of RAM there is about 4.3 million bogomips.
Fun :)
(most of this is corporate fileservers, exchange, AD, various crappy apps, network appliances, web servers, SQL servers and idles at around 20% in use). If it all went off you'd need earplugs and fireman's equipment.
The servers have four logical processors like this
[1] https://community.cloud.online.net/