Anything with SD card storage will perform very poorly. Anything that uses USB 2.0 as a system bus will perform like dogshit.
Using real SSDs on a real SATA channel makes an immense difference, not just in performance but also in system stability. SD cards are meant to be linearly loaded up with files, dumped to disk, then erased. They do not handle highly random write loads with sectors of extreme write intensity very well, their wear levelling is very minimal and sooner or later you will burn them out if you're not careful. The typical way around this is using a write-protected SD card for bootstrapping (if necessary). You load a minimal driver stub, and then you either boot from a USB stick or you do a PXE boot from an image on the network.
USB 2.0 is way too limited to handle your entire system disk+network traffic+data disk load. You want USB 3.0 at a minimum if your computer is set up like that.
If you just want something real minimal maybe the SD card options are OK, but I highly, highly recommend a SSD-based system if you can swing it at all. If you're not going to see a ton of traffic, maybe you could build it out once and run it on your corporate network? That could be more appealing than a hosted or colo'd solution, depending on the task.
What exactly is stopping ARM boards to have high IO?
Just allow people to use a normal 2.5" SSD or even m2 and you have a really nice machine!
For example, the latest Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU which is faster than my 1st machine (and maybe even my 2nd and 3rd) but is severly handicaped by the IO speed which is limited to USB (plus, all the USB ports and Ethernet using the same controller for extra slowness).
A quad-core ARM with a RAM slot supporting at least 8GB, a giga Ethernet port, 4 separate USB ports and a SATA connection would be glorious.
The Raspberry Pi CPUs were designed for smartphones, so they have a limited USB port that was only intended to support that use case.
To the extent these sorts of boards use CPUs that are cheap because they are made in high volume for other applications, we'll continue to suffer from IO limitations for what we want.
For 32 bit ARM, it seems to be shortcuts in the SoC design a.k.a there's a reason some boards cost under $50.
There exist some designs with real SATA (eg. Cubietruck) but those have poor CPUs (A7), and there exist many designs with SATA-via-USB which is never going to be fast. Also micro SD cards have abysmal performance for the sort of random I/O that operating system root filesystems have.
Luckily the situation in 64 bit ARM server land is much better. The APM Mustang and AMD designs have a combination of fast cores and properly engineered I/O subsystems. Real SATA, multiple 10gigE and 1gigE interfaces, PCIe, etc.
SoCs with 8GB onboard is a pretty niche chip, but other than that it's all out there. The Raspberry Pi/2 is actually a pretty poor offering - you can do better, even at the same price, The Pi Foundation just does a better job of marketing.
Specific models are the ODroid XU4, the CubieBoard or Cubietruck, the Banana Pi, etc.
They're not cheap, but the Jetson TK1 is an extremely powerful offering for this category based on the Tegra K1 SoC. You get SATA, USB 3.0, mPCIE, 1GigE, GPU with 192 Kepler cores, etc. If you need some grunt you can even do CUDA compute. Again, I'm still waiting for my Tegra-X1 based Jetson, NVIDIA :<
Demand mostly. Also the way ARM does I/O is a bit different, that said, a memory mapped "smart" disk controller is pretty straight forward, the trick is getting access to the memory bus crossbar switch inside the chip. Bolting one on, all of your peripherals go through one memory bus.
What would be really interesting is if ARM introduces a way to use a high speed serial bus (think PCIe) which would allow for the development of a 'south bridge' type IO chipset for ARM machines.
Because they're usually based on mobile phone or similar SoCs. However, at least 4 companies are promising to deliver Server-class chips this year - Cavium, Avago (ex Broadcom), Qualcomm, and AMD.
(Edited to add) Incidentally, most of the above are designed to have more than 8 cores. Cavium's ThunderX has 48, for example. Both Cavium and Broadcom previously delivered many-core MIPs designes, so this isn't vaporware either.
The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
Seconding this. I use an ODROID XU3 (the earlier model) for testing Servo on multicore ARM and it's surprisingly fast, especially if your workload parallelizes. It's amazing how much CPU/GPU power you can get for $75, and since it's both parallel, cheap, and based on a mainstream consumer SoC I would love for it to be a harbinger of things to come :)
What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics (the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).
Everyone who says this is a bad price for the hardware, please link me to any other bare metal server for rent at 16e/mo. I haven't seen it, not at Hetzner, nor anywhere else.
You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.
Dual-Core CPU AMD Athlon Regor 3.2GHz
3GB RAM
500GB SATA
5TB Traffic
40$ on serverpronto
Simmilar setup with 2GB RAM goes for 19 GBP on 1on1 in the UK
HP ProLiant DL120 with a Dual Core Xeon 4GB of RAM and 2TB storage goes for 29 Euro's on Leaseweb...
Is it 16? nope, but don't even compare 16 Euro's for a didcated cell phone with no storage, no IO and very poor performance is like leasing a TI calculator as a compute cloud....
online.net will sell you an x64 server for as low as 6e/m, and with scaleway you can get an ARM server with a significantly better storage story for 10e/m.
There are a myriad of low-cost dedicated server providers in this price range that are not selling SD cards and other consumer hardware.
scoopr|10 years ago
I wonder how the performance compares to say the scaleway[0] offerings, I would guess the SD card storage doesn't compare favourably.
Given that there are 6eur/mo one core intel dedis[1][2] and 16eur/mo 8core with 8gig ram and vastly more disk space[3], these seem a bit expensive.
[0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ [1] http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml [2] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-scg2 [3] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc
paulmd|10 years ago
Using real SSDs on a real SATA channel makes an immense difference, not just in performance but also in system stability. SD cards are meant to be linearly loaded up with files, dumped to disk, then erased. They do not handle highly random write loads with sectors of extreme write intensity very well, their wear levelling is very minimal and sooner or later you will burn them out if you're not careful. The typical way around this is using a write-protected SD card for bootstrapping (if necessary). You load a minimal driver stub, and then you either boot from a USB stick or you do a PXE boot from an image on the network.
USB 2.0 is way too limited to handle your entire system disk+network traffic+data disk load. You want USB 3.0 at a minimum if your computer is set up like that.
If you just want something real minimal maybe the SD card options are OK, but I highly, highly recommend a SSD-based system if you can swing it at all. If you're not going to see a ton of traffic, maybe you could build it out once and run it on your corporate network? That could be more appealing than a hosted or colo'd solution, depending on the task.
fierarul|10 years ago
Just allow people to use a normal 2.5" SSD or even m2 and you have a really nice machine!
For example, the latest Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU which is faster than my 1st machine (and maybe even my 2nd and 3rd) but is severly handicaped by the IO speed which is limited to USB (plus, all the USB ports and Ethernet using the same controller for extra slowness).
A quad-core ARM with a RAM slot supporting at least 8GB, a giga Ethernet port, 4 separate USB ports and a SATA connection would be glorious.
hga|10 years ago
To the extent these sorts of boards use CPUs that are cheap because they are made in high volume for other applications, we'll continue to suffer from IO limitations for what we want.
rwmj|10 years ago
There exist some designs with real SATA (eg. Cubietruck) but those have poor CPUs (A7), and there exist many designs with SATA-via-USB which is never going to be fast. Also micro SD cards have abysmal performance for the sort of random I/O that operating system root filesystems have.
Luckily the situation in 64 bit ARM server land is much better. The APM Mustang and AMD designs have a combination of fast cores and properly engineered I/O subsystems. Real SATA, multiple 10gigE and 1gigE interfaces, PCIe, etc.
paulmd|10 years ago
Specific models are the ODroid XU4, the CubieBoard or Cubietruck, the Banana Pi, etc.
They're not cheap, but the Jetson TK1 is an extremely powerful offering for this category based on the Tegra K1 SoC. You get SATA, USB 3.0, mPCIE, 1GigE, GPU with 192 Kepler cores, etc. If you need some grunt you can even do CUDA compute. Again, I'm still waiting for my Tegra-X1 based Jetson, NVIDIA :<
ChuckMcM|10 years ago
What would be really interesting is if ARM introduces a way to use a high speed serial bus (think PCIe) which would allow for the development of a 'south bridge' type IO chipset for ARM machines.
ajb|10 years ago
(Edited to add) Incidentally, most of the above are designed to have more than 8 cores. Cavium's ThunderX has 48, for example. Both Cavium and Broadcom previously delivered many-core MIPs designes, so this isn't vaporware either.
pjc50|10 years ago
wyldfire|10 years ago
The ODROID XU4 (referenced specifically by this link) has much better I/O throughput than Pi 2. It's still pretty affordable, too (75-80 USD).
> supporting at least 8GB
This is less common, but I figure it should arrive within 12-18 months.
rjsw|10 years ago
The Allwinner A80 seems a step backwards to me as they don't seem to have included SATA, though you would be able to address 8GB of DRAM.
pavlov|10 years ago
rwmj|10 years ago
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
ChuckMcM|10 years ago
pcwalton|10 years ago
What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics (the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).
mahouse|10 years ago
elcct|10 years ago
tinco|10 years ago
You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.
xeroxmalf|10 years ago
dogma1138|10 years ago
Simmilar setup with 2GB RAM goes for 19 GBP on 1on1 in the UK
HP ProLiant DL120 with a Dual Core Xeon 4GB of RAM and 2TB storage goes for 29 Euro's on Leaseweb...
Is it 16? nope, but don't even compare 16 Euro's for a didcated cell phone with no storage, no IO and very poor performance is like leasing a TI calculator as a compute cloud....
manacit|10 years ago
online.net will sell you an x64 server for as low as 6e/m, and with scaleway you can get an ARM server with a significantly better storage story for 10e/m.
There are a myriad of low-cost dedicated server providers in this price range that are not selling SD cards and other consumer hardware.
afandian|10 years ago
bendev_test|10 years ago
pjc50|10 years ago
philtar|10 years ago