ARM Desktops and Servers

For all your Raspberry Pi's, BeagleBoard's, Parallella's, ORDROID'S, TV boxes et al.
User avatar
Dirk Broer
Corsair
Corsair
Posts: 1962
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:24 pm
Location: Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
Contact:

#1 ARM Desktops and Servers

Post by Dirk Broer »

It used to be simple: for x86 and x86-64 you have Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD, all in 32-bit and 64 bit varieties.
For destop users who like to cling on their old trusted PowerPC CPUs there's AIX or OSX. There's even Linux if you know where to look.
For server users there is IBM-Power, SPARC and Itanium (only 64-bit), but you'd be bonkers to run BOINC on them, most projects do not cater apps for those platforms, or not anymore.

SBCs mostly have an ARM SOCs or one by MIPS. As OS the choice is Android, or Linux/ARM.
The same holds for tablets and smart phones/mobiles/handys/ThingInYourPocketThatGoesRing!.

Sometimes companies thought they might bring out servers with ARM SOCs, e.g. AMD (Opteron A1100) and CAVIUM (ThunderX, ThunderX2), but so far they did not reach Joe Public.
This seems about to change now that Huawei have brought out Desktop and Server boards for their Kunpeng 920 ARM SOCs.
The Desktop model is aimed straight at Joe Public and has the choice out of a quad- and a octo-core setup. The Kunpeng Desktop Board D920S10 supports the PCIe 3.0 interface, six SATA 3.0 hard interfaces, and two M.2 SSD slots. Memory consists of a quad-channel DDR4-2400 interface that supports a maximum of 64GB of capacity, and the board supports ECC, too. It also has an embedded Ethernet controller and naturally supports additional networking cards up to 25 GbE. For mundane everyday connectivity, the motherboard also supports four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, giving it all of the requirements for a desktop PC. If the TDP of one of these boards is below 25 Watt, I'm in -provided it is below 100 Euro's, SOC included as it seems onboard.
Image
The server board is dual socketed -so far, the server chips are four-way SMP enabled- and has up to 64 cores per SOC.
Image
So far these Kunpeng 920 SOCs are single threaded, but the Huawei/Hisilicon Roadmap shows next-generation SoCs such as the Hi1630 which are to be branded as the Kunpeng 930 series.
Those chips are expected to feature a higher-performance core with higher frequencies, simultaneous multi-threading support, and Arm’s Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) extension.
Those chips will are also planned to move to DDR5 memory.
Image

Return to “Single-board Computers”