gallier2 (gallier2.delete@this.gmx.de) on August 28, 2014 2:42 am wrote:
> Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on August 27, 2014 3:56 pm wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Synology's repartition of processors on their different generations of NAS servers is also quite interesting
> http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/What_kind_of_CPU_does_my_NAS_have
> it shows that the only architecture losing is Power as older
> generations used PowerQUICC chips for the higher models.
> Going from the x12 serie to the x13 serie there is indeed a bigger Atom proportion, but this trend didn't
> continue to the x14 series which is mostly ARM (the generation number is the year the model came out).

x11/x12/x13 look close to 50/50 x86 and ARM - mostly XScale, so you could say 100% Intel. Then x14 is 80% ARM, and all the XScales are finally replaced by modern ARMs...

Wilco