Interesting, I kind of expected AMD to be first out the gate with one.<p>From : <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/applied-micro-canonical-claim-the-first-arm-64-bit-server-production-software-deployment-7000029958/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/applied-micro-canonical-claim-the-first...</a><p><i>"The X-Gene is an ARMv8 64-bit Server-on-a-Chip package running at up to 2.4GHz. It combines 10/40 Gigabit mixed signal I/O with what AMCC calls an enterprise-class memory subsystem. Compared to x86 architectures, AMCC claims that it delivers four-times the processor density while using less than 50 percent of the power and delivering comparable-to-better overall performance."</i><p>The picture shows multiple cores, but not how many. What struck me though is that they are pitching "density and less power", presumably they mean you can put twice as many of these servers in the same power foot print that you currently put x86 machines and get 8x (4x * 2) the computing power.<p>In case you are wondering, that is a 'super computer' pitch, it tickles the pain points of these arrays of super computers, but sadly it does not hit the 'web services' pain points. I'd love it if they said, 1TB of ECC protected RAM, dual 10G ethernet, and 32 full speed independent 6GB SATA channels on each server unit. That would help me make a more responsive web infrastructure.
<a href="http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/red-hat-64-bit-arm-developer-preview-jon-masterss-keynote-at-linaro-asia/#content" rel="nofollow">http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/red-hat-64-bit-arm-deve...</a><p>Jon Masters' keynote at Linaro Asia earlier this year. Jon is heading Red Hat's efforts on aarch64. In brief he wants:<p>- upstream kernels only, single kernel boots on all manufacturers' hardware (no kernel zoo like on ARM 32 bit)<p>- UEFI + ACPI (no device tree nonsense)
We made a (failed) play to get our hands on an AMD opteron devkit in order to talk about running xen on it. I did some research regarding arm64 + xen and put some notes up here <a href="http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophobia/2014/05/survey-of-xen-and-arm-servers.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophobia/2014/05/survey-of-xen-and-a...</a> in case anyone is interested.
Well that's far too much money for me to spend, but I am excited to see it.<p>Can anyone comment on whether or not ARMv8 is beneficial in embedded environments with limited memory? Will we eventually see self-contained ARMv8 microcontrollers?