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ne of the big themes of the
Linley Data Center Conference
last week was the possibility that ARM
could finally start to get traction in the
data center. In the opening keynote,
Linley Analysts Jag Bolaria and Bob
Wheeler said that microservices
and hypercovergence are creating
opportunities for ARM but that they
would be less than 5% of the market
this year. Actually, considering that
they are at pretty much zero today,
that would be something that looks
like the beginning of success.
In fact, with perfect timing, just
before the conference opened, Google
and Qualcomm announced that they
would be working together. Or at least
there were off-the-record reports that
they would. Since Google installs over
300,000 CPUs per year, even a small
percentage being ARM would start to
be a large number. Other providers, in
particular Amazon, install CPUs at a
even higher rate.
The keynote on the second day was
by Jon Masters of Red Hat, where he
is the chief ARM architect. His talk
was titled, How ARM Servers Can
Take Over the World. He subtitled
it, "or how an industry is coming
together to do something disruptive."
Red Hat have been involved with ARM
servers since the beginning, including
co-intitiating many standardization
activities associated with ARMv8.
He gave a brief history of their
involvement:
• 2011: Red Hat ARM team formed,
industry
standardization
effort
begins, secret RED Hat ARM v8 OS
bootstrap begins, ARMv8 architecture
announced, Red Hat on stage with
AppliedMicro (showing X-Gene)
• 2012: Many design collaborations
initiated, Linaro Enterprise Group
(LEG) started, OpenJDK initial
release. Showed the bicycle powered
ARM server to show potential of low-
energy compute.
• 2013: ARMv8 hardware arrives
at Red Hat, world's first public
demonstration, Broadcom announces
Vulcan ARMv8 server processor.
• 2014: ARM server base system
architecture (SBSA), ARM server base
boot requirements (SBBR), Red Hat
on stage with Cavium (ThunderX),
Red Hat demonstrates rack-level
provisioning and launches ARM early
access program
• 2015: Ceph Cluster (AppliedMicro
X-Gene, AMD Seattle, Cavium
ThunderX and others), Red Hat
Enterprise Linux Sever 7.1 and 7.2
development previews, Qualcomm
announces 24-core prototype server
SoC
What is driving potential growth of
ARM servers? Jon pointed out four
trends:
I don't think I need to tell any reader
here about SoC integration.
Changing workloads refers to the fact
that traditional, often proprietary,
workloads are being replaced with
open-source software that doesn't
have the same porting challenges.
O
How ARM Servers Can Take Over the World
Paul McLellan, Cadence
42 l New-Tech Magazine Europe