16-Core HoneyComb LX2K ARM Workstation Looks To Offer A Decent Performance Oomph

[edwaleni]

That compares to the Cavium/Gigabyte Thunder Station @ about $9k per. Cavium was showing it off in 2018, but I don't think anyone has it.

• 2 x Marvell^® ThunderX2^® CN9975 28-core ARM processors
• 8-Channel RDIMM DDR4 per processor, total 24 x DIMMs
• Dual 10Gb/s SFP+ LAN ports (QLogic^® QL41102)
• 1 x Dedicated management port
• Onboard Broadcom^® SAS3008 controller
• 2 x 2.5" SATA in rear side, 24 x SAS/SATA hot-swappable HDD/SSD bays
• SAS expander with 12Gb/s transfer speed
• 8 x PCIe Gen3 expansion slots
• 2 x OCP Gen3 x16 mezzanine slots
• Aspeed^® AST2500 remote management controller

Accessible if you can pass the Cavium sniff test. You can't just "order it". You have to tell Cavium what you are going to do with it first.

[Guest]

That compares to the Cavium/Gigabyte Thunder Station @ about $9k per. Cavium was showing it off in 2018, but I don't think anyone has it.

• 2 x Marvell^® ThunderX2^® CN9975 28-core ARM processors
• 8-Channel RDIMM DDR4 per processor, total 24 x DIMMs
• Dual 10Gb/s SFP+ LAN ports (QLogic^® QL41102)
• 1 x Dedicated management port
• Onboard Broadcom^® SAS3008 controller
• 2 x 2.5" SATA in rear side, 24 x SAS/SATA hot-swappable HDD/SSD bays
• SAS expander with 12Gb/s transfer speed
• 8 x PCIe Gen3 expansion slots
• 2 x OCP Gen3 x16 mezzanine slots
• Aspeed^® AST2500 remote management controller

Accessible if you can pass the Cavium sniff test. You can't just "order it". You have to tell Cavium what you are going to do with it first.

A bit of beast, but who needs it? Not small companies, not middle corporations, not support systems of big corporations,... But, maybe core system of big corporation, and systems for very big corporations...

Usually, information system products claim to handle over 10k simulateneous users without scaling, on regular server with 4C or 8C with database on different server with 8C. Internally, it means going over tens of thousands of employees, and even maybe that's not enough,.. As not every employee uses the same application, but it depends on role.

[DanL]

I think it's worth pointing out that the x8 slot is open-ended, just in case folks are wondering whether they can use an x16 card at x8 speed. I'm guessing it's PCI-e 3.0?

[Jabberwocky]

A bit of beast, but who needs it? Not small companies, not middle corporations, not support systems of big corporations,... But, maybe core system of big corporation, and systems for very big corporations...

Usually, information system products claim to handle over 10k simulateneous users without scaling, on regular server with 4C or 8C with database on different server with 8C. Internally, it means going over tens of thousands of employees, and even maybe that's not enough,.. As not every employee uses the same application, but it depends on role.

Web and Message Queues are two good applications for the ThunderX2's type of hardware. All companies that are using software that runs on ARM can make use of it, if you are a small company you can even hire this hardware remotely with "per hour" billing.

More practical: CDN (static), System monitoring or streaming related. There are many use cases for this system.

[starshipeleven]

I think it's worth pointing out that the x8 slot is open-ended, just in case folks are wondering whether they can use an x16 card at x8 speed. I'm guessing it's PCI-e 3.0?

Yes, Gen3.

This puppy can have up to 24 PCIe lanes, x8 is the biggest port it supports. You can run more or less anything in a x8 PCIe3 slot without a significant bottleneck.

https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-processors/layerscape-communication-process/layerscape-lx2160a-multicore-communications-processor:LX2160A

This thing's main target is midrange or high midrange network appliance (businness firewall and such), and currently top of the line in its family.

[starshipeleven]

I'm assuming from what I'm reading about this chip that it does not have built in Mali graphics

Fuck that garbage

[starshipeleven]

Currently, (Note the software is still baking) at idle without frequency scaling, 32GBs of memory and a 1TB nvme drive I am idling at about 26 watts. At full load things hover at just about 50 watts. This is measured at the input of the PSU so the power supply inefficiency's are also included in those numbers. The SOC has 8 clusters of 2 cores, so hopefully with additional work we can drop the idle consumption down.

Could you check if this puppy can operate ECC RAM? The SoC can do it if I look at the spec sheet, but is the feature enabled and working?

This is a very important thing for me and some others. So far the only other affordable ARM device with ECC support is the Helios4 and it's a NAS with 2GB soldered.

[linux4kix]

Could you check if this puppy can operate ECC RAM? The SoC can do it if I look at the spec sheet, but is the feature enabled and working?

This is a very important thing for me and some others. So far the only other affordable ARM device with ECC support is the Helios4 and it's a NAS with 2GB soldered.

Yes. I am currently testing 32GBs of Crucial 2666 MHz ECC memory, and it is properly detected and ECC is enabled.

NOTICE:  32 GB DDR4, 64-bit, CL=19, ECC on, 256B, CS0+CS1

[haerwu]

How goes SBSA/SBBR stuff? Virtualization? m.2 bandwidth/speed?

[haerwu]

Also would be nice to see it compared to other AArch64 systems. APM Mustang, 96borads DeveloperBox, ThunderX(2).