Posted on Thursday, May 31 2012 @ 20:58 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Dell introduced the ARM-based Copper servers, a limited roll-out for testing purposes. Full details
at Bit Tech.
The Dell Copper systems feature a 3U rack-mount chassis packed with up to 48 Marvell Armada system-on-chip processors based on ARM's Cortex-A15 'Eagle' IP in a 64-bit implementation. The chips are mounted on sleds of up to four chips, with twelve sleds per system. Each SoC forms a self-contained server, with each sled featuring a dedicated gigabit Ethernet connection to a non-blocking L2 switch for inter-server communication.
While Dell's design is impressive, it's hardly the first: HP recently announced its own ARM server initiative under Project Moonshot, while microserver companies have been investigating ARM-based chips alongside Intel's low-power Atom range for many-core servers for years.
