Gelsinger Shoots Down EMC On ARM

Nerval's Lobster writes "EMC president and incoming VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger most likely shot down any hope that the company's storage arrays would be built around the ARM architecture. Gelsinger, who also helped orchestrate the VMworld show in San Francisco this week, presented an Aug. 29 keynote at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, Calif. Afterward, an audience member told Gelsinger that as many as 25 percent of all servers could be shipped around the low-power ARM architecture, then asked if Gelsinger agreed with that estimate. EMC previously shifted its product lines to Intel processors. Gelsinger told the audience member that the situation is unlikely to change, even if ARM could deliver workloads at a fraction of the power of an X86 chip."

duh

[afidel]

EMC arrays are already pushing more than what four westmere cores can do and they don't even have some of the cool features that the new breed of all flash arrays are doing (global dedupe and inline block compression). It will be a LONG time before ARM can handle todays storage workloads, let alone all the cool stuff they should be adding.

Re:duh

[tlhIngan]

Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.

One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.

I could swear the NAS appliance sitting on my desk at home had the EMC logo on it. And I know it has an ARM processor in it, specifically a Marvell XScale chip. It runs a modified version of Linux, but it's an EMC box (and even has some approved for VMWare thing on it).

So yes, EMC has gone ARM on the low end, specifically the stuff they market under their consumer brand as Iomega ("An EMC company").

Plenty fast for the home user, probalby sufficient for a mom and pop company, but will be woefully insufficient for anything larger. But nothing wrong - ARM makes it cheap and decently performing.

Ya well

[Sycraft-fu]

ARM fanboys are convinced that ARM is in every way superior to Intel and if only all the stupid companies/users out there would realize it then the world could switch and start the glorious ARM revolution.

I've gotten pretty used to it on /. :P

Re:duh

[jkflying]

It's worse than that when you need something that uses lots of cache, like Java. I'm getting ~100x better performance on my i5 laptop than my Pi when doing Java FPU benchmarks, and this is with the Raspbian (hardware FPU) release.

Pat Gelsinger, former CTO of Intel

[charnov]

In other news former CTO of Intel who has huge amounts of stock options says Intel chips are awesome! Seriously though, our tiny little SAN maxes out 8 Xeon cores and 16 GB of ram while running less than 30 heavy VMs (80,000 IOs on average). I don't see ARM in this space for a while.

Re:The disk drives use more power than the CPU

[CajunArson]

Grandparent poster is right on 32 bits and anonymous coward is a stupid marketing drone. Arm recently released a specification for chips that will use 64 bit addressing... when they finally ship in 2015 or so, making them about 12 years late to the party* after the launch of the Athlon 64.

* Yes I know that 64 bit was around much much longer than 2003, but I'm talking about the consumer space here.