On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 01:42:40PM -0400, Solomon Peachy wrote:
With very few exceptions (eg Gigabyte's mostly-unobtainable
MP30-AR0 or
some locked-down appliance-type servers) they've all been ultra-dense
high-end boxes (dozens of cores per U) priced into the stratosphere or
glorified cell phone devkits (eg Tegra-based stuff) that don't sport
enough memory (or other expandability) to run a modern desktop OS.
While I generally agree with what you're saying, I just want to point
out a few systems that are available now.
The Gigabyte MP30-AR0 can be purchased, eg from
https://www.xcase.co.uk/server-motherboards/gigabyte-mp30-ar0-with-applie...
It's basically an X-Gene 1 which is 3+ years old at this point (made
on an even older process) so don't expect dazzling performance, but
this is still a reliable workhorse for development. It boots the
upstream kernel, takes up to 128 GB of RAM, and has UEFI
(unfortunately not out of the box). I have one, and I can stuff a
dozen virtual machines, mixed armv7 & aarch64, without it breaking
into a sweat.
Just appeared a few days ago is this one:
http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/06/26/599-softiron-overdrive-1000-server...
Quad core AMD Opteron (codename Seattle, Cortex A57). A bit cheaper
than the Gigabyte. UEFI out of the box and comes with SUSE installed.
Finally the LeMaker Cello (also quad core AMD Seattle) is maybe/
possibly/probably going to ship this month, at least according to an
email that they sent out a couple of days ago. If and when I ever get
it I'll write about it on my blog,
https://rwmj.wordpress.com/
I think the aarch64 situation - while hardly ideal - is much better
than POWER.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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