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HP to customize Moonshot offerings, offer ARM and Xeon
chipsAgam Shah, IDG News Service\New York BureauNEW YORK
(04/08/2013) - Hewlett-Packard in the future will offer customized
Moonshot servers at different
prices and also offer configurations with ARM and Intel Xeon
processors.
HP on Monday started shipping the first offering in its new
class of hyperscale servers called Moonshot, which
runs on processors built for smartphones and tablets. The
initial Moonshot system has a fixed configuration with
45 Proliant servers -- also called cartridges -- based on
Intel's Atom S1200 x86 low-power processors, and will be
priced at US$61,875.
Over time, customers will be able to work with HP to configure
Moonshot depending on how the server will be
used and that also will determine the price, said Mark Potter,
senior vice president and general manager of the
Industry-Standard Servers and Software group, in an
interview.
Moonshot will also be part of HP's customized server offerings
such as CloudSystem, which is for now based on
HP's ProLiant industry-standard servers. HP will also offer
Moonshot as an option to customers looking to buildmodular data
centers.
While HP decided to initially go with Intel processors, Moonshot
with ARM processors will be released in the
second half of the year. HP is working with chip makers like
Calxeda and Texas Instruments, which make ARM
chips, Potter said.
The initial Moonshot configurations will be based on mobile
chips, but HP will also ultimately offer Intel's high-
performance Xeon chips for the server, Potter said. He did not
provide a date on when Xeon chips would be
available for the server.
Moonshot servers are designed to be processor agnostic and will
be able to mix and match ARM and Intel
servers, Potter said. The company also wants to mix in FPGAs
(field programmable gate arrays) and other
processing units to boost performance on the servers.
The first iterations of Moonshot servers are designed to handle
large volumes of fast-moving Internet and cloud
tasks. The dense servers can scale performance quickly and help
companies save energy, space and cost
compared to racks of traditional 1U or 2U servers running on
conventional server processors such as Intel's Xeon
or Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.
"It will represent a whole new category of server architectures
that fits what we call the Internet of things" to
hyperscale environments, Potter said.
An increasing amount of information from mobile devices and
smartphones is being sent to servers, and
Moonshot represents a shift in the way information is processed
and shared, Potter said.
But the server is built for specific workloads and is not
intended to replace industry-standard servers that can
handle different types of workloads, Potter said.
The effort to develop Moonshot servers was first unveiled in
November 2011 with an ARM server design, and HP
later added a new design called Gemini with Intel's low-power
Atom processors. HP decided to go with server-
ready Intel processors to launch Moonshot commercially and
continues to work with ARM processor and software
companies, Potter said.
"Not every single one of those workloads needs an x86
processor," Potter said.
For example, Texas Instruments' Keystone multicore chip, which
has four ARM Cortex-A15 processor cores and
eight digital signal processors (DSPs), may be better at
processing voice, which makes it useful for certain
telecommunications applications, Potter said. There is also an
interest in Moonshot running TI's chips in analyzing
seismic data, Potter said.
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The commercial launch of Moonshot will be a breakthrough for
ARM, which designs and licenses
microprocessors, but has no presence in the server market yet.
ARM's processors are found in most smartphones
and tablets, but the processor designer is looking to make its
way upstream into the high-margin server market.
ARM faces the challenge of unseating Intel, which dominates
servers and is now aggressively pushing its low-
power Atom server processor line.
HP will upgrade Moonshot to Intel's latest server chip
code-named Avoton, which will ship later this year andsucceed the
Atom S1200. The new Atom chip is faster and more power efficient,
thanks to a new
microarchitecture. The chip is also made using Intel's latest
22-nanometer manufacturing process.
ARM has known weaknesses such as 32-bit and limited software
support, but HP sees promise in the processor
in certain applications. ARM has already announced a 64-bit
architecture called ARMv8, which will be used in
chips that begin shipping next year.
