Aaron Spink (aaronspink.delete@this.notearthlink.net) on August 27, 2014 2:21 pm wrote:
> Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on August 27, 2014 1:34 pm wrote:
> > To recap:
> > The argument made (enthusiastically by juanrga, more moderately by others) is that the
> > ARM-64 server CPUs which we should see from various vendors will do well because they
> > will offer a compelling performance/power advantage over their x64 competitors.
> > The argument made by me is a variant of this which places substantially more stress
> > on business issues --- the costs of the CPUs/SOCs to design and then manufacture, the
> > costs for which they can be and are sold, the worry that (so far negatively profitable)
> > Atoms will cannibalize Intel's higher end if they are improved too much.
> >
> > With this background, there is a fairly large review of NAS units at AnandTech today:
> > http://www.anandtech.com/show/8404/seagate-intel-rangeley-nas-pro-4bay-review
> > This is interesting to me in the context of this argument because my argument has long been that ARM will
> > get its start in servers at the low-end, in things that many don't want to call servers, like NAS units.
> >
>
> As has been pointed out previously...
>
> This is a market that ARM/MIPS/et al, was once dominate and pretty much the only game in town. Pretty
> much all the low end NAS boxes shipped with some form of ARM and/or MIPS processor. Since Intel released
> ATOM, there has been an increasing trend of x86 pushing the ARM processors to the lowest of the low end
> - basically the entry level NAS that you buy if the only thing you possibly care about is price.
>
> AKA this is a market where ARM has been getting hammered for at least the last 5 years. It is following
> a trend currently that is opposed to your theory. There are several reasons for this.
>
> Even a lowly ATOM CPU tends to provide a significantly higher performance in this workloads, even
> older Intel SATA chips tend to be much better than anything else on the market, and the software
> stacks for Intel IO devices tend to be significantly better than any software stack for ARM IO.
>
> A large portion of this is due to the fact that the bread and butter market for Intel cares about things like
> IO performance, SATA performance, et al. The bread and butter market for ARM SOC has IO almost as an after
> thought: when was the last time you saw a performance comparison of ARM SOCs in IO? pretty much never right?
> that's because they basically don't do IO and the levels of IO they do do are generally quite pathetic.

When do you date this time of "ARM/MIPS once dominant and then Intel coming in"?
As a comparison point, Atom comes out in 2008.
I'm looking at AnandTech and they have reviews going back to 2010. The first two reviews are for an ARM-based unit (a pathetic little thing that's a single HD with attached ethernet) and an dual-core Atom unit running Windows Storage Server.

Going to Tom's hardware and backwards in time, I see some Atom units in early 2010, a Tolapai unit (Pentium M SoC), a Conroe unit (early 2009), ARM for late 2008, something that looks to be AMD-based in mid 2007, something in early 2007 which is Windows-only (which I take to imply that it's running some version of Windows of an Intel core), mid 2006 we have something Intel based --- but it's an IOP 80219 which is an XScale (did you see that twist coming?!).
[Intel sold its XScale/ARM unit to Marvell in 2006, so it's sorta the descendant of this chip that's in all these later ARM-based NAS's].
Before 2006 we don't seem to have much NAS as a category; I'm guessing before then CPUs were not powerful enough/cheap enough for this to be a separate category and we're still in the world of the "file server" as the category, except for enterprise.

What I get from this (admittedly impressionistic) scan of the past is a rather different history from what you give. What I see is devices that are pretty much all Intel until about 2010 --- admittedly in once case using the ARM ISA, but based on Intel IO parts. The early ARM parts begin really low end, supporting a single drive (no RAID), and grow from there, only really taking off in 2011 or so.
This is not really surprising. Part of the initial NAS market was based on Windows Storage Server (obviously x86 only), so we need to start by putting together a Linux infrastructure. Even when that's in place, we need Linux ported to ARM which again takes time. I don't know when that was really up and running, but, as a datapoint, Linaro is founded in mid 2010.