<story><title>Is Arm ready for server dominance?</title><url>https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>&amp;gt; I can&amp;#x27;t pull out my visa card and go buy a (atx, microatx, mini-itx) format motherboard for an ARM CPU, the CPU itself, RAM, etc, and build a system to run debian, centos, RHEL, ubuntu whatever on.&lt;p&gt;The difference between ARM and x86 is that there&amp;#x27;s no standardized ARM interface between the motherboard and the CPU—no ARM equivalent to ACPI. Every integration of an ARM CPU into a board is bespoke. So you have to buy &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it&amp;quot;, not just an ARM CPU and board separately.&lt;p&gt;But, if you relax that restriction, it&amp;#x27;s not like it&amp;#x27;s hard to acquire &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it.&amp;quot; 80% of single-board computers (e.g. the Raspberry Pi) are &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it.&amp;quot; You can wipe pretty much any Android device (not just phones, but also HDMI &amp;quot;streaming boxes&amp;quot;, which are a convenient form-factor for basing a workstation on) and install Linux on them. There are also some higher-end development&amp;#x2F;SDK boards for ARM embedded systems, like the Nvidia Jetson. What more do you need?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>My concern about this is that with the failure of Qualcomm Centriq, there is no industry standard&amp;#x2F;affordable&amp;#x2F;easy to buy ARM based server platform ordinary persons and small&amp;#x2F;medium sized businesses can acquire.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s great that Amazon has ARM based stuff, but it&amp;#x27;s something proprietary they&amp;#x27;re purchasing in large quantities from a manufacturer they have a very close relationship with. Undoubtedly the physical hypervisor platform and motherboard these things are running on is something totally bespoke and designed to Amazon&amp;#x27;s unique requirements.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t pull out my visa card and go buy a (atx, microatx, mini-itx) format motherboard for an ARM CPU, the CPU itself, RAM, etc, and build a system to run debian, centos, RHEL, ubuntu whatever on.&lt;p&gt;This means that, sure, you can get an EC2 ARM based server, but it&amp;#x27;s something you can&amp;#x27;t physically own and you&amp;#x27;ll be paying cloud based service rates forever if you want to keep running it. There are some categories of business and government entities where not having things on-premises, or fully owning and controlling the hypervisor all the way down to the bare metal, is a non starter.&lt;p&gt;If the ARM platform Amazon is buying becomes truly price&amp;#x2F;performance competitive with a single&amp;#x2F;dual socket xeon or threadripper&amp;#x2F;epyc, it also gives a possible competitive advantage to Amazon over any medium-sized cloud based VM provider out there currently selling (xen, kvm) based VMs on x86-64 hypervisors.&lt;p&gt;Based on what&amp;#x27;s available on the market right now I see no signs of there being a viable hardware-purchasing alternative to Intel or AMD based motherboards and CPUs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>als0</author><text>&amp;gt; The difference between ARM and x86 is that there&amp;#x27;s no standardized ARM interface between the motherboard and the CPU—no ARM equivalent to ACPI. Every integration of an ARM CPU into a board is bespoke. So you have to buy &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it&amp;quot;, not just an ARM CPU and board separately.&lt;p&gt;Not exactly true. ARM server chips do have ACPI. The trick is buying a CPU that is SBSA[1] and SBBR[2] compliant. Then most things work as expected.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.docs.arm.com&amp;#x2F;den0029&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;Server_Base_System_Architecture_v3_1_ARM_DEN_0029A.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.docs.arm.com&amp;#x2F;den0029&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;Server_Base_System_Arc...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infocenter.arm.com&amp;#x2F;help&amp;#x2F;topic&amp;#x2F;com.arm.doc.den0044d&amp;#x2F;Server_Base_Boot_Requirements_1_2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infocenter.arm.com&amp;#x2F;help&amp;#x2F;topic&amp;#x2F;com.arm.doc.den0044d&amp;#x2F;Se...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Arm ready for server dominance?</title><url>https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>&amp;gt; I can&amp;#x27;t pull out my visa card and go buy a (atx, microatx, mini-itx) format motherboard for an ARM CPU, the CPU itself, RAM, etc, and build a system to run debian, centos, RHEL, ubuntu whatever on.&lt;p&gt;The difference between ARM and x86 is that there&amp;#x27;s no standardized ARM interface between the motherboard and the CPU—no ARM equivalent to ACPI. Every integration of an ARM CPU into a board is bespoke. So you have to buy &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it&amp;quot;, not just an ARM CPU and board separately.&lt;p&gt;But, if you relax that restriction, it&amp;#x27;s not like it&amp;#x27;s hard to acquire &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it.&amp;quot; 80% of single-board computers (e.g. the Raspberry Pi) are &amp;quot;a board with an ARM CPU on it.&amp;quot; You can wipe pretty much any Android device (not just phones, but also HDMI &amp;quot;streaming boxes&amp;quot;, which are a convenient form-factor for basing a workstation on) and install Linux on them. There are also some higher-end development&amp;#x2F;SDK boards for ARM embedded systems, like the Nvidia Jetson. What more do you need?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>My concern about this is that with the failure of Qualcomm Centriq, there is no industry standard&amp;#x2F;affordable&amp;#x2F;easy to buy ARM based server platform ordinary persons and small&amp;#x2F;medium sized businesses can acquire.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s great that Amazon has ARM based stuff, but it&amp;#x27;s something proprietary they&amp;#x27;re purchasing in large quantities from a manufacturer they have a very close relationship with. Undoubtedly the physical hypervisor platform and motherboard these things are running on is something totally bespoke and designed to Amazon&amp;#x27;s unique requirements.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t pull out my visa card and go buy a (atx, microatx, mini-itx) format motherboard for an ARM CPU, the CPU itself, RAM, etc, and build a system to run debian, centos, RHEL, ubuntu whatever on.&lt;p&gt;This means that, sure, you can get an EC2 ARM based server, but it&amp;#x27;s something you can&amp;#x27;t physically own and you&amp;#x27;ll be paying cloud based service rates forever if you want to keep running it. There are some categories of business and government entities where not having things on-premises, or fully owning and controlling the hypervisor all the way down to the bare metal, is a non starter.&lt;p&gt;If the ARM platform Amazon is buying becomes truly price&amp;#x2F;performance competitive with a single&amp;#x2F;dual socket xeon or threadripper&amp;#x2F;epyc, it also gives a possible competitive advantage to Amazon over any medium-sized cloud based VM provider out there currently selling (xen, kvm) based VMs on x86-64 hypervisors.&lt;p&gt;Based on what&amp;#x27;s available on the market right now I see no signs of there being a viable hardware-purchasing alternative to Intel or AMD based motherboards and CPUs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>floatboth</author><text>&amp;gt; no ARM equivalent to ACPI&lt;p&gt;The ARM equivalent to ACPI is ACPI.&lt;p&gt;ACPI is not &amp;quot;between the board and CPU&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;between the OS and the computer&amp;quot;. Which is actually much more important. Writing drivers for bespoke PCIe, USB and SATA controllers is not fun. ACPI standardizes configuration of these things.</text></comment>