New-Tech Europe | April 2016 | Digital edition

How ARM Servers Can Take Over the World

Paul McLellan, Cadence

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ne of the big themes of the Linley Data Center Conference

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.

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

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