Applied Micro demos clean slate approach to cloud computing

Hot on the heels of ARM’s recent announcement of the 64-bit Version 8 ISA (instruction-set architecture), Applied Micro Circuits Corp demonstrated X-Gene, the first 64-bit ARM Linux running on the first ARM 64-bit hardware (Reference 1 and 2). The demonstration of the core on an FPGA platform was three years in the making. Applied Micro was a strategic partner with ARM on the development of Version 8; 128 of the devices, operating at 3GHz, will be on X-Gene when it becomes available for sampling in 2H 2012.

Applied Micro entered the cloud-computing server market because it saw an opportunity to fundamentally change server design, recognizing a disparity between data servers’ original tasks and their current tasks. That disparity is wreaking havoc with the total cost of ownership, which is based not solely on capital expenditures but also on power consumption and is rising at an incremental rate of $95 million per day.

At the demonstration, Andrew Feldman, founder and chief executive officer of SeaMicro, described how data and server needs have gone from internally oriented approaches in which the staff is told to wait in line, to customer-oriented cloud computing, in which wait states are not tolerable. “The work changed, but servers didn’t,” he says.

The wait states are a result of the “bursty” nature of Internet traffic, which can overload servers; meanwhile, downtimes mean that servers are still consuming vast amounts of power in idle mode. Feldman sees a need for small, simple CPUs to improve computation-per-unit power. His company currently uses Intel’s Atom but is now shifting to the Version 8. “We will shrink the motherboard to the size of a business card and then connect them,” he explains.

The processor tackles the problem from the angles of improved efficiency, hardware usage, and improved latency. From a hardware point of view, this move entails higher integration, efficient out-of-order cores, and virtualization support. The device integrates the cores with all of the networking and I/O, including PCIe and 10/40/100 GbE, all connecting through a coherent terabit fabric and an 80-Gbyte/sec memory throughput. Software support includes Lamp, MySQL, Stack, Apache Server, and Linux. “The cloud is synonymous with Linux,” says Paramesh Gopi, president and chief executive officer of Applied Micro.