Submitted by Would you believe that ARM processors, those little chips that power so many smartphones and tablets, have a future on servers? Ubuntu does.
Would you believe that ARM processors, those little chips that power so many smartphones and tablets, have a future on servers? Ubuntu does.
Why not? I see great potential here. Maybe that old Nokia E61 could run a web server with it?
Maybe a mobile cloud server? With little applets called rain drops.
It already does,
http://research.nokia.com/page/231
Datamation article
“I think that ARM is very promising,†Torvalds said. “The problem is that ARM doesn’t have a standard platform.â€
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/arming-linux.html
Agree 100%. ARM is probably nice hardware, it just lacks one big thing : a standard hacker-friendly package, playing a role similar to that of the IBM PC.
Edited 2011-08-23 04:04 UTC
Good job we have Raspberry Pi on the way then
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
Here’s to hoping that it will achieve this goal. It lacks an equivalent of IBM’s and Intel’s backing to the PC, in my opinion, but I might be surprised in the upcoming years.
Not just Ubuntu have recognized that ARM might power many future servers. http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-arm-really-take-on-…
…nothing special and old news.
Also ARM Servers with Ubuntu have been for sale for a while already:
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ZT-Systems-R1801e-/
Edited 2011-08-23 11:48 UTC
Waiting (im)patiently for such desktop motherboard, in standard ATX form factor.
I have heard rumors that Red Hat is working hard on ARM for the server environment. Some hardware maker recently announced that they have servers coming out that will pack 10k cores into a single rack. Thats pretty awesome.
From what I have heard, the biggest thing holding people working on ARM back is the lack of high through put systems. One person I know working on Fedora for ARM is using a cluster built out of ARM boards, but they lack gigabit or high speed data connections. That was slowing things down a bit according to him.
Getting a 64-bit processor at current speeds and number of cores, or getting current processors running at 3+GHz? As far as 32-bit processors only being able to access 4GB RAM, I believe ARM has found a way to address the problem without it being “hackish”.
Since ARM processors are customized for specific devices, it would help if a generic model would be released so we could buy it and build our own ARM-based desktops, and/or buy laptops with ARM processors in them. Windows, I believe, is what has kept this from happening, at least indirectly. If you take all the people that use Linux/*BSD, I bet the vast majority of them multi-boot with Windows so you will have that many less customers. Hopefully, this will change when Windows 8 is released.
actually, ARM is pretty generic. The extras in our devices come to deliver video decoding, 3d accelerated graphics, and such. Those aren’t really the type of things you would need on a server platform.
Well sure, why not you could just slap a bunch of ARM cores together and enjoy that. However there is no real uniform platform for that now and I think we first need to establish that before we can go on.
Then we need to see how the market can develop, I would expect any tasks handled by BSD and Linux servers can be ported to this. And a lot of software for those servers is already using multiple cores/processors at the moment.
Only for the other platforms like Windows servers and Solaris I think this transition would be more difficult.
Edited 2011-08-23 16:14 UTC