Everybody knows that ARM dominates the embedded market, where it ships more units per year than the entire population of the Earth. But it is making inroads in, shall we say, more “niche” markets, too, like PCs and servers. According to this <https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/02/arm_server_china/>, Canalys boss Steve Brazier says ARM already makes up 16% of the public cloud (and an even higher proportion of servers in China). But another interesting figure he mentions is “nine percent of PCs”. Now, we know that Windows-on-ARM is not that popular. Therefore, that 9% must be almost entirely running Linux-based OSes, including ChromeOS.
I see that AWS have ARM arch servers available. E.g. They use the AWS Graviton2 processor. From wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS_Graviton ... "The Graviton2 CPU has 64 Neoverse-N1 cores, with ARMv8.2-A ISA including 2x128 bit Neon, LSE, fp16, rcpc, dotprod, crypto. The vCPUs are physical cores in a single NUMA domain, running at 2.5 GHz." Till the end of the 2023 you can try out, for free, the AWS EC2 t4g.small configuration. This is 2 x cores of a Graviton2 CPU, 2GB's of RAM and 8GB of SSD. See... https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t4/ ...or... https://repost.aws/articles/ARdZ3_Qv8TQdyWhmy4npRMRQ/announcing-amazon-ec2-t... The one I use is located in Sydney. cheers, Ian.
Do you notice much difference between an ARM-based machine and an x86-based one?
The Linux I'm using on the ARM arch AWS machine is Ubuntu 22.04 server. After installing it I did $ sudo apt update, installed Wordpress and its prerequisites including MySQL, PHP8.1, and Apache2. I then added the CiviCRM plugin for Wordpress and an extension to it called CiviVolunteer. This is just a testing/development configuration and being an AWS EC2 t4g.small its just 2xCPU's, 2GB RAM, and 8GB SSD. It's performance is fine, but its just me pottering around on it. For what I've been doing on this server, its ARM arch seems just the same to me as if I'd been using x86 arch. Note: I initially tried a 12-months-free-tier from AWS. This was the t2.micro. This uses the Intel Xeon Scalable processor up to 3.0GHz. The configuration was 1xCPU, 1GB RAM, and 8GB SSD. I got the Ubuntu 22.04 Server, Wordpress, MySQL, PHP8.1, Apache2 installed and then the system hung trying to install the CiviCRM plugin for Wordpress. I.e. Ran out of RAM. Below is a bit of an SSH look around the AWS ARM arch server. Let me know if you want the output of some other bash commands. Admittedly Bezos wants your credit card details when you sign up to AWS. But you can set a warning e-mail to be sent if it looks like a month of usage will be costing you anything. Last month I got a warning e-mail saying that I was approaching being invoiced one cent. cheers, Ian. FYI: A SSH look around. (I've anonymized the IP address with xxx-yyy)... ubuntu(a)ip-172-31-xxx-yyy:~$ uname -a Linux ip-172-31-xxx-yyy 5.19.0-1028-aws #29~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 20 19:13:00 UTC 2023 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux ubuntu(a)ip-172-31-xxx-yyy:~$ lscpu Architecture: aarch64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Vendor ID: ARM Model name: Neoverse-N1 Model: 1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Stepping: r3p1 BogoMIPS: 243.75 Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs Caches (sum of all): L1d: 128 KiB (2 instances) L1i: 128 KiB (2 instances) L2: 2 MiB (2 instances) L3: 32 MiB (1 instance) NUMA: NUMA node(s): 1 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1 Vulnerabilities: Itlb multihit: Not affected L1tf: Not affected Mds: Not affected Meltdown: Not affected Mmio stale data: Not affected Retbleed: Not affected Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl Spectre v1: Mitigation; __user pointer sanitization Spectre v2: Mitigation; CSV2, BHB Srbds: Not affected Tsx async abort: Not affected ubuntu(a)ip-172-31-xxx-yyy:~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 1892384 1011432 175140 35664 705812 682892 Swap: 0 0 0
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 21:06:30 +1200, Ian Stewart wrote:
Admittedly Bezos wants your credit card details when you sign up to AWS. But you can set a warning e-mail to be sent if it looks like a month of usage will be costing you anything. Last month I got a warning e-mail saying that I was approaching being invoiced one cent.
Thanks for that. I have heard that the AWS plans are an absolute maze of twisty little options, all different, and seemingly designed to confuse you into spending money you didn’t intend to. So it seems like you can avoid the traps.
participants (2)
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Ian Stewart -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro