Why isn't Calxeda's ARM processor running at 2GHz or more?

Calxeda made a lot of news with multiple news articles.

HP Builds Servers With Cellphone Chips

New York Times (blog) - ‎4 hours ago‎

Hewlett-Packard announced on Tuesday a new design for some of the world's largest computer centers and says it could reduce power consumption in some cases by 90 percent. The design, called Project Moonshot, replaces the conventional...

Calxeda Stretches ARM into the Clouds

Wired News - ‎4 hours ago‎

By jonstokes On Tuesday, Austin-based startup Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM system-on-chip (SoC) for cloud servers. At first glance, Calxeda's looks like something you'd find inside a smartphone, but the product is essentially a complete server ...

Calxeda Introduces EnergyCore ARM Processor for Servers

PC Magazine - ‎4 hours ago‎

The EnergyCore can draw as little as 1.5 watts for a dual-core server chip, and can create a full quad-core server, including 4G of DRAM and an SSD, that draws just five watts of power. But what makes the chip stand out, ...

ARM Breaks Into One Of Intel's Strongholds (ARMH, INTC, HPQ)

San Francisco Chronicle - ‎5 hours ago‎

Chip designer ARM has long dominated the market for smartphones and tablets, leaving Intel scrambling to catch up. Now, it's getting chance to break into one of Intel's strongholds -- server hardware. This morning, Hewlett-Packard announced a plan ...

HP Plans Low-Power Servers Using Calxeda ARM Chips

InformationWeek - ‎5 hours ago‎

HP's tiny servers built on Calxeda's energy efficient Cortex chip are designed to handle large Web data streams, video processing, picture uploading, or Hadoop-style big data analysis. By Charles Babcock InformationWeek HP on Tuesday launched Project ...

But, I don't know if I am as excited as the press is.  Why?  I have been talking to ARM for over a 3 years on the opportunities for ARM servers in data centers and have been waiting for over a year for Calxeda to make a chip announcement.

So, looking at the specifications.  One of the questions i have is why does the Calxeda processor run at 1.1 - 1.4 GHz and not at 2GHz?

EnergyCore™ ECX-1000: Technical Specifications

Processor Cores Up to four ARM® Cortex™-A9 cores @ 1.1 to 1.4 GHz

Here is the spec for the A9 processor.

Speed Optimized: The speed-optimized hard macro implementation provides system designers with an industry standard ARM processor incorporating aggressive low-power techniques to further extend ARM’s performance leadership into high-margin consumer and enterprise devices within the power envelope necessary for compact, high-density and thermally constrained environments. This hard macro implementation operates in excess of 2GHz when selected from typical silicon and represents an ideal solution for high-margin performance-oriented applications.

In the HP press announcement there as quote to emphasize performance needs.  So, why not a 2 GHz clock rate?

“The volume of data processed in financial markets has increased exponentially, and traditional scale-up or scale-out architectures are struggling to keep up with demand without vastly increasing cost and power usage,” said Niall Dalton, director of High-Frequency Trading at Cantor Fitzgerald, a company that is currently evaluating the technology. “HP is taking a holistic approach to solving this problem and working to bring unprecedented energy and cost savings for tomorrow’s large-scale, data-intensive applications.”

Another question I have is what is the architecture to manage the Energy Cards.  This could be the opportunity for HP.

EnergyCard Reference Designs

EnergyCards are production-ready boards designed by Calxeda to demonstrate the full breadth of capabilities offered by the EnergyCore platform. With this as a building block, system OEMs can leverage Calxeda’s design expertise, allowing them to easily bring hyper-scale solutions to market in a fraction of the time required for ground up custom designs.

...

The HP Redstone Server Development Platform is the first in a line of HP server development platforms that feature extreme low-energy server processors. Initially incorporating Calxeda EnergyCore™ ARM® Cortex™ processors, future Redstone versions will include Intel® Atom™-based processors as well as others. HP Redstone is designed for testing and proof of concept. It incorporates more than 2,800 servers in a single rack, reducing cabling, switching and the need for peripheral devices, and delivering a 97 percent reduction in complexity.⁽¹⁾ The initial HP Redstone platform is expected to be available in limited volumes to select customers in the first half of next year.

Is vendor lock-in a problem to solve or should you manage your purchases better?

CIO magazine has a post on the Open Compute Project and how it takes aim at vendor lock-in.

Facebook Data Center Project Takes Aim At Vendor Lock-in

Facebook's Open Compute Project aims to reduce 'gratuitous differentiation' among IT vendors

By Joab Jackson
Thu, October 27, 201

IDG News Service — By launching the Open Compute Project as a stand-alone foundation, Facebook is hoping to further standardize the market for data center equipment, thereby reducing costs and vendor lock-in, the new foundation's board members said at a press conference Thursday.

"What has been missing here has been standardization at the systems level," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, an OCP board member who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later was the first major investor in Google. He railed against "gratuitous differentiation" on the part of server vendors, who each have their own unique chassis or some other component that prevents users from intermingling the equipment with gear from other vendors.

But are vendors really the problem or is it how companies make their purchases the problem? The smart data center guys are looking at the hardware purchases and data center designs as a complete system and they need engineering talent in the company to design the systems and choose the right hardware.

You could blame the vendors, but they are doing what any company would do figuring out how to maximize their profits, and differentiate their products vs. others.

Are vendors reacting to the way customers buy or are vendors defining how customers buy?  Facebook is drawing attention to what happens if hardware designs are open sourced.  But as Kevin Heslin asked last week at the Open Compute Project, how does the foundation determine what is open sourced and what is not?

Is Open Source Hardware the answer or is it how companies purchase?  Think about it.  Buying Open Compute hardware changes the purchasing process.

Open Compute Project as a lower cost model, Rackspace and Facebook

Rackspace and Facebook are on the board of the Open Compute project.  SeekingAlpha has post on the open source process both of these companies embrace.

Rackspace Doubles Down On Open Source Process

Open source has been vital in creating the cloud. The open source process allowed many companies to use what began as Google's (GOOG) MapReduce, evolving it into things like Hadoop (originally a Yahoo (YHOO) project), entire cloud stacks like Red Hat's (RHT) OpenShift, and services like Amazon's (AMZN) EC2 in relatively short order.

The author drills to the bottom line of why Open Compute?  lower costs.

Strip away its adherence to the open source ethos, after all, and Rackspace is just a hosting vendor, no different from hundreds of other small hosting companies like Westhost or SoftLayer. At some point this competition will come down to costs, as usage of the resource scales exponentially. Low cost infrastructure will win.

Right now costs are not the key issue in the cloud. Right monetization is the issue. That's why every vendor – from Oracle (ORCL) to Dell (DELL) to Apple (AAPL) – can call what they do “cloud.” But as usage increases 10 times, then 100 times and 1,000 times, what seem like small differences in costs now will become magnified into big differences in profitability.

One way to look at Open Compute Project is it is an effort to build a lower cost data center ecosystem.

Open source, and the Open Compute project, put Rackspace at the forefront of these changes. They are key to its long term survival.

Google vs. Facebook European data center locations

One way to look at Google vs. Facebook European data center locations is to plot on a map the sites.

A - Google Dublin

B- Google Hamina, Finland

C - Google Belgium

D - Facebook Lulea, Sweden

Google has three major data center sites.  In Asia, Google has three future sites - Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  Recognize a pattern?  Three is a good number, says GreenM3 :-)

Keep in mind given Google has built its three data centers it most likely looked at sites all over Europe before it picked its three locations.  Think about being in three sites as an option to building one mega site.  I watched an established company follow the advice of the so called data center experts justifying a single site as their first data center.  For less than 10 MW, it can make a lot of sense to have three 3 1/3 MW sites to enable geo redundancy of services.

Happy Halloween

Halloween is a great time to be with the kids.  After a week in NYC, I am ready for a day for candy, trick or treating, and following the kids as they run from house to house.

Happy Halloween!

Here are my kids 7 years ago, and they are just as happy.