HP Announces First ARM Servers: Project Moonshot

By Douglas Perry
published

HP has begun using ARM processors for a new server platform called Redstone, which will become available in the first half of next year.

Project Moonshot is the first product to leverage this platform and integrate "more than 2800 servers in a single rack." As expected, HP will be using Calxeda Energycore processors, which draw as little as 1.5 watts per dual-core unit. Down the road, HP said it wants to use Intel's Atom processors for its Redstone platform and indicated that it is interested in using other ARM-based products as well. However, Intel is currently not a Moonshot partner; the listed companies are ARM, AMD, Calxeda, Canonical and Red Hat.

To introduce Redstone, HP will pen so called "Discovery Labs," which will enable customers to test their applications on actual servers. It is a similar idea HP already had back in 2001 when it opened testing facilities for its customers in Palo Alto. The first Discovery Lab will be in Houston and go into operation in January of next year. Additional labs will be offered in Asia and Europe in the future.

HP said that its Redstone servers will consume 89 percent less energy and 94 percent less space than traditional data center installations. These servers will also be about 64 percent cheaper, the company said.

Douglas Perry
17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Device Unknown
    Total Win their.
    Reply
  • Parsian
    Question: Can you do all the task you could do on an x86 on an ARM?
    Or Is ARM just can handle a subset of instructions can be developed base on need and usage?

    Thanks
    Reply
  • JeanLuc
    Good old ARM CPU's just goes to show that Britain still invent great things from time to time.

    AN ARM based server is long overdue, I'm guessing its the software that has held it back but with it's low power draw demand for low powered servers was eventually going to force the market to break away from the same old Intel and AMD based x86 options.
    Reply
  • Device Unknown
    Well, sure. Providing the software supports it's instruction set. With windows 8 being ported for it, that will solve that problem. Linux supports it. No games that i know of, except ones made for linux. But if ARM is entering the desktop scene, expect their to be developers flocking to it.
    Reply
  • Parisian: ARM only needs an ARM compiler, and the source code to the application, not much of anything is hand written in assembly language anymore.

    Being that real men run Linux on their servers, as evidenced by the whopping 90%+ marketshare Linux has on web servers and supercomputers, this shouldn't be a problem. Unless of course, you're a 2nd rate corporate developer fretting about how to run your crappy ASP.NET website, but nobody cares about them anyways.
    Reply
  • kronos_cornelius
    Nice ! ARM shows that no matter how attentive, a monopoly(Intel) always fails to innovate. It's like asking the gazelle to run faster if there is no tiger following. I bet Intel will get its act together 5 years from now. It is hard to tell if the Juggernaut will fall to lower earth (having to compete for once) or will it be able to retool without falling from #1 spot.
    Reply
  • alidan
    ParsianQuestion: Can you do all the task you could do on an x86 on an ARM?Or Is ARM just can handle a subset of instructions can be developed base on need and usage?Thanks
    from what i understand, x86 is more complex, arm is less, x86 gets more done per clock, but eats power like nothing else. arm can get enough done per clock to be relevant, but it also uses such low amounts of power that thats where it saved money, i believe that you could but 6 quad core arms into the same power foot print of one x86, they may be less powerful stand alone, but more powerful together.

    hard for me to explain.
    Reply
  • Sigh! The issue is not the ISA (instruction set architecture). The issue is what a particular chip is designed to do. AMD just came up with two new core designs. One Bobcat, is designed for as little as one watt per core, and implements the full AMD64 ISA. The other Bulldozer, is designed for higher power per core, currently aimed at 10 to 20 watts/core.

    You all know here that Bulldozer has gotten panned for all the wrong reasons. Are there some right reasons for panning it? Yes, but the fact that it takes an "eight core" Bulldozer chip with four modules to compete with an Intel four core chip with Hyperthreading is about terminology. Both chips run eight threads at once, so if you care about throughput not single-thread performance they are equivalent. If you do care about single-thread performance, look at the 2 module (four core) chips, which since they run in the same power envelope, allocate twice the wattage to each core. (Or you can turn two modules off in the BIOS, just like you can turn off Hyperthreading.)

    Back to Bobcat. AMD is selling one part with no GPU and superlow power draw, but it does not have server features like virtualization and ECC memory support. Apparently AMD is working on an SoC (system on a chip) version of Bobcat that will include these features. However, I don't expect it to show up before next year.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    Interesting...

    But can it play crysis?
    Reply
  • mcd023
    did those things not even have fans on the heat sinks? wow. I'm sure they're not the top performers, but they definitely hit a big area of the market. Very impressive. they fit 72 servers where they would've had four.
    Reply