GigaOM » Applied Micro

Applied Micro’s cloud chip is an ARM-based, switch-killing machine

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:00:14 +0000

Applied Micro Circuits, a chip firm that designs silicon parts for the computing and networking world, has spent the last three years making a big bet on the cloud computing market and the ARM architecture. The results began shipping last week, and the product essentially takes networking and computing and crams it all onto one system on a chip.

Dubbed the X-Gene server on a chip, the product has been touted by Applied as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence, the ideal part for webscale users (check out the pic of Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky holding one up) and also the future of Applied Micro. It’s the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip. It’s like shoving the networking and computing vision of the Cisco Unified Computing System on a chip.

This is a big deal. Although the first generation won’t have enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a switch at the top of a rack, the following generation will.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage (the board in the picture uses an FPGA instead of a production silicon) AND are now in the hands of several customers, including Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

Gopi’s big bet

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and contains eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores that Applied has designed, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software (the pink bit on the block diagram below), four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives. In short, this a chip that combines networking and computing in one package.

When about asked about the power consumption of the chip, Gopi said it will run at 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption.

“We’ll be able to run your LAMP stack and SQL jobs on Xeon-class ARM cores, and the routing protocols and such will be running on the Atom-class ARMs,” Gopi said. “It’s the fundamentals of a rack on a single chip.”

Building this chip has taken four years. It required Gopi to visit ARM at its U.K. headquarters to convince them to give him an architecture license to build a chip for servers. In an interview with me at the Open Compute Summit in January, Gopi explained that he saw the flexibility and the architecture that ARM offered could become an asset for webscale computing, so he embarked on turning Applied Micro, a public company with a few hundred million in revenue, into a startup.

Like others, such as Barry Evans of Calxeda or Andrew Feldman of Sea Micro, he saw that power issues were raising the cost of operating data centers — and cutting into the bottom line at web businesses — and he thought he had a solution. His solution was to get an architectural license from ARM, so he could make a 64-bit-capable chip ahead of ARM’s plans to introduce that powerful a core. ARM introduced that core last year, and vendors of ARM-based server chips such as AMD and Calxeda expect to have 64-bit-capable chips next year. But Applied is shipping those machines today.

“We’ll end this wimpy core vs. brawny core debate once and for all,” Gopi said.

The new hardware mindset

Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi.

Gopi has taken advantage of several different trends that are finally coming to fruition. The first trend is the use of the ARM core — ubiquitous in cell phones and tablets — for the enterprise and cloud computing market. But he’s also taking advantage of a more subtle shift happening in the chip world as it pertains to the data center — namely the opening up of the ecosystem.

The mobile industry has relied upon the common ARM architecture to build a wide variety of chips that give each vendor a slightly different set of features. Both Nvidia and Qualcomm start with ARM cores (hell, even Apple has an ARM architectural license) to build their application processors. This lowers the cost of designing chips, because engineers can start from a higher level when solving problems.

And the modularity of the ARM cores combined with an architecture license also means firms can customize their designs for a certain market without spending a huge amount of time or dollars. Gopi will actually address some of this at our Structure event June 19 and 20, in a presentation on designing hardware at the speed of software.

For Applied, this dynamic plays out in the existence of a new type of chip for the data center, but also in the fact that in nine or 12 months Applied plans to test the second-generation X-Gene chip, one that will support 100-Gigabit Ethernet and will obviate the need for a top-of-rack switch. Ironically, this architecture probably won’t be a welcome development for Applied’s existing networking clients like Cisco and Juniper.

But it’s clearly the direction that large webscale customers want to go. And the second-generation architecture is also important for the first-generation X-Gene products, because without it, Applied may not have a chance at getting technically savvy and forward-looking potential customers that need not just a single interesting product, but a real understanding of the roadmap before they commit to a new architecture.

So even as Applied ships these first products to customers for use in devices that hit the market at the end of this year, it’s already developing its production of the next generation 28-nanometer versions of the heavy-duty ARM cores and 100-Gigabit-capable networking while prepping for later versions that may include photonics and other elements that data center customers are already discussing as tomorrow’s technology.

It took a bold vision — and that trip to ARM — for Gopi to get Applied Micro to the table as these discussions about the next generation data center are playing out. But with this design, it has earned a seat. Now all it has to do is earn the business.

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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:12:23 +0000

The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent and publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines and investors look for value investments and give money to those companies able to scale with little additional capital.

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Cleantech and investment in 2013

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:05:16 +0000

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Facebook, AMD, HP and others team up to plan the ARM data center takeover

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:03:19 +0000

In case you’ve been following Hurricane Sandy coverage as opposed to ARM’s tech conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, the chip IP company had two significant announcements. First, it gave details and dates for its next-generation cores, and its licensees all decided to go gaga for servers.

And while the new A-50 cores ARM announced will be a step up for mobile devices (and those cores are 64-bit- and 32-bit-compatible, paving the way for ARM in more compute-intensive devices), the biggest news of the week was servers. Applied Micro said it would be building a new chip platform using the coming 64-bit cores, and AMD took a license for ARM cores with plans to launch ARM-based chips for servers in 2014. Dell even launched some ARM machines for processing big data right before the show.

So chipmakers and hardware vendors are buying into this ARM server idea, and with Facebookand Amazon representatives onstage at the AMD event, it appears even IT buyers are willing to give cell phone chips in servers a try. But for smaller companies, the emerging ARM ecosystems will need software. Microsoft has been half-hearted in its support for ARM-based chips (Windows RT supports it but Windows 8 doesn’t) and VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger (who used to work for Intel) has also scoffed at the ide a of ARM-based servers.

This is why Linaro, the open-source consortium created in 2010 to develop software for non-PC chips, has created a new program for building software for ARM-based servers. The consortium created a new program with lower fees and resource commitments that will bring teams from Facebook, HP, AMD, Red Hat, Calxeda and more together to build firmware and other necessary software for ARM-based machines. Linaro unveiled the program Thursday.

Also on Thursday, Applied Micro, which says it will have 64-bit-capable ARM-based chips for servers in the first half of 2013 (ahead of pretty much everyone else who has shared release dates), showed of other software vendors who will support ARM. Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi emailed me to say:

Oracle will be speaking at our session—Java is huge for the ARM 64-bit server push and truly rounds out the ecosystem. The discussions tomorrow will highlight that the ecosystem will be ready when silicon is ready. We announced Red Hat last week, Java is announcing this week and it is clear that the industry is moving to support 64-bit ARM for a new breed of cloud server.

These are big wins for ARM, and making sure there’s a software ecosystem ready for the hardware when it comes out will only help accelerate the platform. And as AMD’s John Williams, VP of server marketing and business development, told me after his company’s announcement on Monday, ARM isn’t going to displace x86 chips in the data center for all applications, it’s merely a new entrant that has an opportunity because the data center scale has changed as have the workloads running in those data centers.

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Red Hat-Applied Micro deal is another vote for ARM in the data center

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:36:38 +0000

Let’s just get this straight. Next week at ARM’s tech development event in Santa Clara, Calif., there’s going to be a lot of talk about getting cell phone chips into servers. The bet here is that using ARM-based chips in servers, as opposed to the traditional x86 processors that Intel and AMD make, will be more energy efficient and better match the processing needs of many of todays applications.

Last week, Calxeda kicked it off with news of its product roadmap, and Dell followed with its own announcement of an ARM-based server designed for Hadoop. HP, Dell, Penguin Computing, Boston Ltd., Cavium and Marvell also are all officially on the ARM server train. On Monday, AMD is expected to announce that it’s taking an ARM license.

There will be ARM-based chips in production environments by the end of this year, but those will only be 32-bit and capable of addressing smaller amounts of memory. Still, Dell, Calxeda and others argue that 32-bit processing is good enough for Hadoop and a few other specific data center workloads.

However, to really break ground in the server world, you need a chip capable of 64-bit processing that is widespread across the enterprise market. Which is why it’s significant that on Thursday, ARM, Red Hat and Applied Micro Circuits Corp. said they were getting together to develop a 64-bit server design platform. Applied Micro, a server maker, is announcing the Applied Micro X-Gene Server on a Chip aimed at the big data and cloud server market.

Red Hat will be responsible for building support within the Fedora community for the new 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, in hopes of making this dream a reality in time for the actual launch of 64-bit capable ARM cores next year. The company’s support is important, as has been Canonical’s previous support, because you need software capable of running on ARM-based chips. It would be nice if VMware were to step up and say that it wanted to support ARM in the data center, but so far that hasn’t happened.

In the coming week I expect to see more news highlighting the much-needed development of the ARM-server ecosystem. Stay tuned to see more ways the chips from your cell phones will invade data center.

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Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:31:50 +0000

Cloud computing is shaking up the worlds of computer design and microprocessor-chip design, and its related concepts and business models have changed both industries, possibly forever. In the near future we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) that stick with their existing product lines and a separate group of nontraditional players (Tilera and others) that start fresh in order to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. This report examines some of the most important trends and technologies influencing this space right now.

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Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Cloud computing continues to change and shape the technology industry, and these days discussions are about more than simply reorganizing the IT department. New developments in chip and hardware architectures, finding greener data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying data analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. For this report, GigaOM Pro has gathered six of its analysts to discuss these topics and others in current cloud market. Here we present several areas to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud.

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