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hß · HardwareCurated

Economical Linux server with 16 MIPS64 processor cores

Summary

In 2006 Movidis presented the Revolution x16 server with a Cavium Octeon processor, whose 16 MIPS64 cores were to draw less than 30 watts together. The platform offered eight gigabit ports, up to 8 GByte of RAM, a SAS/SATA host adapter and Linux with kernel 2.6.13.5 in NAND flash. The cores only had integer units, but in return accelerators for crypto, compression and TCP.

Ideas

  • Many simple cores replace a few powerful ones for network and server workloads.
  • Hardware accelerators take over crypto, compression and packet processing.
  • The operating system resides in flash instead of on a hard disk.

Insights

  • Energy efficiency depends more on tailoring to the task than on clock frequency.
  • Network processors are suited to NAS and web services, not to floating-point computation.

Facts

  • The Octeon cores ran at 500 to 600 MHz.
  • The whole computer was to draw less than 50 watts.

References

Critique

  • The report provides manufacturer information without measurements or a comparison with x86 servers under the same load.

Recommendations

  • Only choose power-saving special hardware if your software is maintained on that architecture.
  • Measure servers’ energy consumption under real load rather than going by the data sheet.

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