768 Arm Cores in 2U @650W - XSLAB

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bryan_v

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Nov 5, 2021
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From a new Korean startup call XSLAB (I think). Product page: XSLAB (Initially loads in Korean, but you can change to English at the top)

Their demo just popped up in my youtube feed, and I'm trying to get more info from the company, though my Korean is virtually non-existant (I can pretty much order food, and get back home at the end of the night if I need to.) I'm trying to find out availability, cost, and what ARM cores they use - they don't have a datasheet anywhere on their site.

It looks like it's 32 ARM based SOMs connected via an internal PCIe fabric to a controller; however each node gets its own NIC so I'm guessing it designed to be addressed via IP rather than PCIe (maybe PCIe is only for power and monitoring). The SOMs look like they're 24 core, 16GB memory, 250GB disk drive and draw 15W (at least according to their web page)

Did anyone see their stuff at any of the conferences this summer, or heard anything about these guys?
Not sure if they're still in prototype or if they're going into production.

It reminds me a lot of UptimeLab's Rasberry Pi blades...

Would be ideal for clustered event driven workloads like a web service that are very parallelizable and don't require alot of horsepower per request.

Also the Youtube presentation video :
 

Patrick

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That is somewhat of a bummer at sub 1GB/ core these days. Using Ampere Altra Max you can do 1024 cores in 2U, albeit bigger and in a deeper chassis (it is in the Wild hardware of OCP video.) At some point, I guess the question is whether you want 256C per node, or if you are OK with over 10x the number of nodes. Looks cool though!
 

bryan_v

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I think they're trying to position it as an edge device from a power/cooling/cost perspective where there may not always be data to feed the system, so you would only have 1 of them in a edge location (they seem to also have an AI line targeting edge-AI video M.2/USB cards that can be attached to commodity hardware). However you make a very good point: if the cores are fast enough, the SOMs might not be possible to keep the cores constantly fed with data, and I'd imagine that problem might be compounded by SATA local storage and a 1G NIC (the dev board has a GbE).

If anything though, it demonstrates the extreme power efficiency high-density ARM solutions can hit (<1W/core), at what I assume would be a mid-tier price point.

I assume Gigabyte or any of the other Ampere Altra Max vendors didn't give any ballpark pricing at OCP?
The main metric I was always concerned about as a CTO was $/request - essentially what is the total cost of an HTTP request; and Arm offerings always beat out x86 by a mile. Something like this might beat out an Ampere solution under certain conditions outside a core data centre.

Bryan
 
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jswlinux

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May 9, 2022
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Hi,

I bought this v-raptor a few years ago, and have operated it. Please feel free to ask me if you have any questions and are still interested in!