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| Calxeda1 |
The EnergyCore can draw as little as 1.5 watts for a dual-core server chip, and can create a full quad-core server, including 4G of DRAM and an SSD, that draws just five watts of power.
But what makes the chip stand out, Calxeda's VP of Marketing Karl Freund said, is an on-chip fabric, which can allow up to 4,096 server nodes without top of rack connections. HP's solution announced today has 288 servers in a 4U (7-inch) chassis. The HP server, part of a new platform HP calls its Redstone Server Development Platform, is initially aimed at development and testing, not full deployment.
The basic EnergyCore system on chip (SoC) includes four main 32-bit ARM Cortex A-9 cores, four megabytes of L2 cache and memory controllers, as well as a fifth "management controller" core, which power-optimizes the entire chip. The four main areas of focus are offline analytics, web applications, middle-tier applications, and storage/file servers.
The company has created a reference design called EnergyCard, with four server nodes, each with four processing cores. On Tuesday, Austin-based startup Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM system-on-chip (SoC) for cloud servers. The current EnergyCore design doesn’t support classic, hypervisor-based virtualization; instead, it supports Ubuntu’s lightweight, container-based LXC virtualization scheme for system management. The classic virtualization model squeezes higher utilization and power efficiency out of a group of high-powered server processors—typically from Intel or AMD—by running multiple OS instances on each processor.
With a Calxeda system, in contrast, you would run 20 OS instances in 2U of rack space by physically filling that rack space with five EnergyCards, which, at four EnergyCore chips per card and one OS instance per chip would give you 20 virtual servers. This high-density, one-OS-per-chip approach is often called “physicalization,” and Calxeda’s bet is that it represents a cheaper and lower power way to run those 20 virtual servers than what a Xeon-based system could offer. The EnergyCore custom SoC that lies at the heart of Calxeda’s approach to power efficiency is built around four ARM Cortex A9 cores than can run at from 1.1 to 1.4GHz.
The EnergyCore Fabric Switch that sits in between the Ethernet blocks and the ARM cores is the key to Calxeda’s ability to scale out a single system to as many as 4096 processors using any network topology that the system integrator or customer chooses. This switch presents two virtual Ethernet ports to the OS, so that the combination of switch, Ethernet channels, and Calxeda’s proprietary daughtercard interface (the latter carries Ethernet traffic to connected nodes) is transparent the software side of the system while providing plenty of bandwidth for inter-node transport.
The crown jewel in Calxeda’s approach is the block labelled EnergyCore Management Engine.
ARM vs. x86 and Calxeda vs. SeaMicro SeaMicro makes a complete, high-density server product based on Intel’s low-power Atom chips that is built on many of the principles described above. As described above, the Calxeda system virtualizes Ethernet traffic so that the EnergyCards don’t need physical Ethernet ports or cables in order to do networking. SeaMicro, in contrast, virtualizes both Ethernet and SATA interfaces, so that the custom fabric switch on each SeaMicro node carries both networking and storage traffic off of the card.
By putting all the SATA drives in a separate physical unit and connecting it to the SeaMicro nodes via this virtual interface, SeaMicro systems save on power and cooling vs. Calxeda (again, the latter has physical SATA ports on each card for connecting physical drives). This ASIC is the analog to the on-die fabric switch in Calxeda’s SoC. So Calxeda had better be on the lookout for some ARM-based competition from SeaMicro in the high-density cloud server arena.
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