Item — HN Reader

This is similar offering to SuperMicro 's MicroCloud. Except with ARM instead of x86. As much as i love ARM and want them to succeed. I dont think there are any advantage of using ARM in Server apart from Cost. And Since ARM is still vastly under power for many Web Server Operation its time just isn't here. May be two - three years later when 64Bit ARM with EightCore Chip costing less then $50 dollars. But even so Intel's Atom would have a similar performance with similar price. According to some new test on the Soon to be available 8 Core Atom for Server it is surprisingly performance / watt.

To simply put, the server market has longed for a low power part for certain type of usage scenario. And Intel will soon has that covered.

1 comments

I don't know about servers (only use/used Xeon x86) and i'm not sure it's different software or if it's Win vs Lin, but I have never touched anything saying Atom on the package being remotely useful for anything while I have a lot of very useful ARM devices. When people coming up to me saying 'I have a new laptop' and then it has an Atom sticker on the front, I know what's going to happen; they'll bring it back after a few days. So Atom in my servers make me cringe. Probably that's not justified?

I do know that in the datacenter we are colo'd, the vast majority of stuff hosted on the dedicated servers there could just as well be hosted on a $5 ARM board. A lot of companies hire complete servers for hosting a website which gets 2 visitors/month. This is also my experience as a long term devop (used to be fulltime, now parttime); servers I maintain, even clusters I maintain, can be hosted on a few $ ARM boards. They want dedicated because it gives them a sense of security and not being 'disturbed' by other sites so an ARM 'server' would suit well in that case. With the power consumption difference and bare metal costs, it's many $100s vs a few $10 per month for the client.

Edit: somewhere in my brain i thought I saw very cheap Atom servers and I did; http://www.ovh.nl/dedicated_servers/isgenoeg_2g.xml . Currently in the OVH sold out mode, but when they are back i'll try one to see how it holds up with one of those minimal sites.

Well for one I dont see any price advantage of ARM compared to Intel. ( In this area ) 8 Core Atoms are Cheap enough. The Atom you are referring to are First Gen Netbook Atoms. Which are indeed very bad without any serious software optimization. The Atom i am referring to is the newest Avoton C2750. Which will soon be available in the OVH new brand SYS range. Assuming every thing else stays the same, Memory, SSD/HDD, Network etc, the cost difference between a Atom Server and a ARM server are in the range of early double digit figure. And there isn't a $5 ARM broad. The ARM SoC provided by Marvell Amanda would have been double of that already. So the cost difference for a rented dedicated server between ARM and Intel Atom would be at most a few dollars difference per month. Not to mention Atom is still a lot of more powerful. Website usage have spikes, no one wants a server that could barely handle the load it is getting at today.

ARM has the advantage in Smartphone and Tablet where there are no software compatibility concern, and it is working at 100s mW range. In Servers these two advantage disappeared.

Yes, that makes sense. And first gen; the current ones for sale in shops are still the first gen? The laptops I see brand new in shops, and they are not netbooks, are unusable to me. Whatever you do beyond opening 1 single window breaks it completely (under Windows anyway). Maybe those are older, I don't know, but I think they are not first gen?

I hope that'll change as you say because I love the price ;)

As far as I know, (@everyone, Do correct me if i am wrong ) most of those are stocks left overs or 1st gen design with smaller node. Which basically means they still sucks. And without an SSD ( I/O bottleneck ) those laptop will suck even more. Since the PC industry has absolutely zero care on user experience they dont want to put a costly SSD into a Atom Notebook.

And Why would anyone want one when a Celeron or Pentium is only $20 bucks more expensive but perform a lot faster still?

FYI (re: consumer Atom) Intel have just started taking Atom seriously again, after majorly neglecting it for the previous 5 years. The current Silvermont/Bay Trail is twice as fast as the last, bringing C2D+ performance (eg 2010 MBA) with tablet thermals and battery life. It will now be on Intel's primary process too, so the days of Atom universally sucking are over (thanks ARM).

Offtopic; Can you point me to a laptop with that? I use a 2010 MBA all the time and if I could get something for the price of an atom with that performance...

See UMPCportal. My favourite is the Asus T100, but it suffers from the problem with most of the current crop of Bay Trail-T devices; 2GB of soldered RAM. 64GB model will be around for $300 around black friday. The HP Pavillion x2 should have 4GB, but is much pricier.

IMO the Acer C720 chromebook is the best deal around currently; just put linux on it and replace the 16GB SSD with a larger one, performance should be even better than the 2010 MBA AFAICT.

Things are definitely starting to get very interesting though, I'll be keeping a close eye on devices released in the next 6mo.

A bunch of tablets are out with the new chips, I'm typing this on a Dell Venue 8 Pro. Acer or ASUS have a 10" model with a keyboard dock to make a proper clamshell.