AMD’s Leendert van Doorn

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) believes that ARM processor architecture will be the future of the data center, and says that servers running on 64-bit ARMv8 chips could be here sooner than you think.

Putting its money where its mouth is, AMD’s Leendert van Doorn yesterday carried out the first public demonstration of two ARM Cortex A57-based servers running Hadoop at Oracle Corp’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

The demo came during a session focused on AMD’s 64-bit ARM strategy, and showed the firm’s hardware being put through its paces alongside Oracle’s Java platform. AMD also used the occasion to provide an update on its OpenJDK project, codenamed Sumatra.

AMD’s Opteron A1100, its first 64-bit ARM chip, won’t be available until the end of this year, although it released the AMD Opteron A1100-Series developer kit for software developers and integrators back in July.

Yesterday’s demo was run on hardware supplied as part of that developer kit, and showcased the potential of using 64-bit ARM-based server clusters to process Big Data applications running Hadoop.

“This demonstration showcases AMD’s leadership in the development of a robust, standards-based ecosystem for ARM servers,” said van Doorn. “Servers powered by AMD Opteron A-Series processors are well-suited for Hadoop, offering an efficient scale-out compute platform that can also double as an economical persistent storage platform.”

One of the biggest advantages of using ARM-based chips in servers is the prospect of application-optimized servers, which include “accelerators” for specific workloads built into the hardware – something that’s so far been economically unfeasible.

Accelerators could be designed to speed up cryptography, image processing, networking, or numerous other functions. More importantly, it’s much easier to integrate these accelerators within the ARM architecture, said Van Doorn.

“They have an open bus architecture and an open infrastructure, [and so] it’s really easy for them to pick those accelerators up,” he said.

The idea certainly holds promise, but AMD could be in danger of losing out to its rivals. Yesterday’s Hadoop demo came just one day after Hewlett-Packard Company unveiled two new ARM-based servers within its Moonshot family, the first commercially available systems to run systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) based on the ARM architecture.

It looks as though we could see several companies at last coming good on their promise to bring the low-power architecture commonly found in mobile devices to the data center.

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