With Rising Power Costs, Are ARM Servers The Future?

By Benjamin Humphrey, Published January 18, 2012

With the move to ‘the cloud’, increasing numbers of internet and mobile phone users, renewable resources on the decline, and a focus on green solutions to current problems, server rooms are getting much more expensive to maintain and run.

Nearly all servers are currently running x86 CPU architecture – the type of CPU most people are familiar with. It’s prevalent in laptops and desktops and has been the world leader in CPUs for many years. Those in the know will be familiar with another CPU architecture which has been taking the mobile world by storm, and now it might be on the verge of tapping into the lucrative server market. Enter ARM.

ARM is already responsible for powering 99% of mobile phones and tablets the world over, and Canonical’s ARM Manager David Mandala believes that Ubuntu Server on ARM is just around the corner.

A brief history of Ubuntu on ARM

Ubuntu on ARM began in 2008 when the team collaborated directly with ARM itself. Some wonder why Ubuntu didn’t go with the Debian route for ARM, and Mandala pointed out that Debian was compiled for an older version of ARM (v4), whereas Ubuntu was compiled for ARM v7.

Ubuntu’s first ARM release came about in April 2009 (Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) which supported one board, the Freescale iMX51. In 9.10 and later, Ubuntu on ARM added support for more boards and in Ubuntu 11.10 last year, support was added for the popular Toshiba AC-100 Netbook.

ARM on servers – what’s the point?

ARM servers suck up much less power than traditional x86 hardware, sometimes as little as 12W at full load. They’re also smaller and generate less heat, which means server banks can cram more servers into a rack (up to 72 servers per unit)!

Ubuntu on ARM 12.10 to be released later this year will be the first to support the new ARM Cortex A15 board which has virtualization support.

Where to next?

ARM is gaining traction in 2012, and Mandala expects ARM 64 bit to hit the mainstream over the next 12 months. In 2013, Ubuntu on ARM will support the controversial UEFI boot which replaces the traditional BIOS and introduces “Secure Boot,” and 64 bit also means Ubuntu on ARM will theoretically support up to 16 exabytes(!) of RAM.

In April this year Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be released and will mark the first time Ubuntu on ARM images are built from ARMhf (hard float) which will make floating point operations and general code much faster. Some operations (such as font rendering and web page scrolling) have seen up to 30% increases in performance.

All up, Ubuntu on ARM has a promising future, on desktops, netbooks, mobile, TVs, and now, servers.

Learn more about Ubuntu on ARM at ubuntu.com/arm and learn more about ARM at arm.com

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  • Anonymous

    “With Raising [sic] Power Costs, Are ARM Servers The Future?” — er, yes, yes they are.  All the movement has been in that direction for some time.  I’m still a bit confused as to why anyone would run Ubuntu on a server, though?  Anyone running Ubuntu servers who’d be willing to give an insight into why they chose to install Ubuntu and not Debian?

    • zekopeko

      Commercial support. Management software. Certification.

      • Anonymous

        You can get those from a company/contractor for Debian.
        Most people paying for that usually go with RHEL or SLES anyways.

  • http://twitter.com/digitalbear11 Bear

    will microsoft force ARM servers to secure boot but windows only?

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IK3GYJHISHUG7XCTGBTMOXTHWU Trigger

      This is something that I am worried about to. 

      • http://www.frothingthefrap.com/ Shannon Black

        most servers are linux based anyways .. microsoft only forces secure booting for anyone that wants to qualify for the “Microsoft Certified” equipment sticker. microsoft cannot force anybody to do anything

        • Anonymous

          Why would anybody care about a bloody sticker that I’m sure most people pull of as soon as they get a computer. I was under the impression that to get a windows license they are required to use uefi

          • http://www.frothingthefrap.com/ Shannon Black

            lol i was euphimising .. to license a product as verified to work with windows 7 :) 

        • Anonymous

          “most servers are linux based anyways”
          Most webservers are. Servers in general, linux has 30-40% market share. The rest goes to UNIX and Windows.

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      Microsoft has never proposed to “force ARM * to secure boot Windows only”. We should let go of this fanaticism and focus on how to solve the problem instead of just whining about how scared we are of Microsoft. The idea that it is impossible to sign a Linux kernel, is very strange to me.

      • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

        True about Microsoft forcing secure boot. It is only for Windows 8 that they force secure boot, as part of the specification. (Now who’s being the coward?)

    • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

      Microsoft, ARM and servers in the same sentence without a “don’t” or “can’t” sounds wrong.
      Microsoft have never had any market share of servers that is substantial. Ever. Unix and Linux are the top contenders because Windows just doesn’t belong in a server rack, because you need to do some hackery or deep modification in order to achieve as integrated functionality as any Unix system has from the first boot.

      • Anonymous

        “Microsoft have never had any market share of servers that is substantial.”
        Source?
        Only web servers Linux is number 1
        Servers in general Linux is 30-40%, the rest is UNIX/BSD or Windows. Windows is very common in server rooms, especially for File servers and email.

    • http://twitter.com/digitalbear11 Bear

      its my understanding to put linux on one of these devices, one would have to do it in a non GPL way…so maybe one could put linux on it…but at what cost?

  • Anonymous

    “With Rising* Power Costs, Are ARM Servers The Future?”

    • http://twitter.com/humphreybc Benjamin Humphrey

      Oops! Sorry, the heat is getting to me.

  • Anonymous

    Are ARM servers the wave of the future? Possibly, but this article doesn’t exactly give anyone reason to believe so.  It  mentions that ARM cores power almost all of the world’s pocket-sized devices (no source cited), which doesn’t mean much when dealing with enterprise servers.  It also states that ARM consumes less power (no source cited), without any information given on how much computational power might be gained before reaching the threshold of previous power consumption rates (even if they’re more efficient, are they “more efficient enough” to be cost-effective, which is the point the title is getting at?).  Finally, it ends by calling forth the Microsoft Secure Boot  bogeyman and calling UEFI “controversial,” as though UEFI itself were the target of people’s ire (it’s not) and suggesting ARM will be a solution to Secure Boot (it won’t, as there isn’t really any problem to solve yet–UEFI and Secure Boot are developed independently, and the former can andn will exist just fine on some motherboards without the latter).  C’mon, guys, this article in its present state is just filler; you folks can do better.

    • http://twitter.com/marcusklaas MarcusKlaasDeVries

      Agreed. ARM computing might be low power in idle, I still believe the best x86 CPUs can do more operations per joule. That would mean that x86 is still the way to go for large datacenters where you can have a sustained load and the idle power advantage of ARM won’t really come into play.

  • brad clawsie

    James Hamilton at Amazon Web Services blogs about this topic constantly. see http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/. he’s not just a random blogger, but someone involved with the most important cloud resource on the web. if AWS is thinking about this, there’s something to it, and they’re big enough to design and commission custom hardware if they thought the upside was big enough.

  • Kamaljit Dadyal

    I am waiting for Intel’s foray into the mobile platform. Their Medfield and Atom platforms have better perforance to power ratio than any offering that ARM has currently. Ubuntu did the right thing in investing in the future with Unity, now it should do the same thing by supporting Intel.

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

       Ubuntu has never ever not supported Intel. What exactly are you talking about? By the way, I haven’t been able to track down anything from Intel that can match what ARM devices currently deliver, considering size, power, heat and cost – all of which are important aspects.

  • http://twitter.com/Sephiroth_VII NCLI

    Uh, UEFI isn’t especially controversial, it’s just that Microsoft is using the enhanced functionality for its own ends.

    UEFI is a much needed replacement for BIOS.

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

       As I see it, the GNU/Linux world has more use for Secure Boot-like things than Windows does. After all, it’s much easier to manipulate an Ubuntu image and distribute it than it is to do the same with Windows.

      The question has to be how we can solve this problem without sacrificing any kind of freedom. I think that’s an interesting challenge. I’m certain it’s not impossible.

      • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

        True statement there.
        But tell me, who would download an Ubuntu image from another website apart from Canonical’s, if they only want the regular image?

    • http://twitter.com/humphreybc Benjamin Humphrey

      Perhaps you should try to find the video feed of Matthew Garrett’s talk “EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it’s awful.”

      http://linux.conf.au/schedule/63/view_talk?day=tuesday

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/C6S22ANL35LHAH27EX43XFQKTQ Klau3

    “With the move to ‘the cloud’…”

    Cloud is nice, as long as I can build my own one.

  • Anonymous

    ARM is still limited to 32 bit afaik.
    There is also no hardware accelerated virtualization.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4ULIFQOOOMVLF7HYZ2UE27RLGE Jimi

    “Nearly all servers are currently running x86 CPU architecture”. Intel servers may be the most numerous but there are several other architectures in large data centres. I expect if you compared the processing power of mainframe and RISC midrange machines to Intel you’d be surprised.

    Oh, and renewable resources aren’t on the decline, there’re renewable.

 
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