[monstermonster]

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.

[higherpurpose]

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:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-d...

AMD will enter the market soon, too, but I think Applied Micro will hold its first mover advantage with its 3rd gen chips coming next year.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324104

[dwild]

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.

[monstermonster]

Interesting!

However if you want one fast core, you're screwed :)

[aimxhaisse]

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.

[rakoo]

Thanks for the trivia. Just to continue on this path, how many virtualized instances can you put on your machine ?

[monstermonster]

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.