Mustang is ‘ready to deploy’

This is a breakthrough technology that holds the promise of rewriting the rules of server power consumption; disrupting the economics of the datacentre as we currently know them and rapid deployment has been achieved through the X-C1 Development kit, which is available from Acal BFi who offer design-in and logistics support.

The X-C1 development kit builds on Applied Micro’s pioneering efforts in the development of X-Gene™, the world’s first enterprise-grade 64-bit Server-on-a-Chip™ silicon. The X-Gene™ Server-on-a-Chip™ platform represents a completely new, ground-up server processor architecture tailored for high density, high performance computing, the emerging growth of cloud computing and next-generation datacentres. Featuring custom high-performance ARM®v8 cores, the device is the first to couple an advanced 64-bit ARM® architecture with unique network and storage offload engines, as well as integrated Ethernet.

The highly integrated, purpose-built X-Gene™ solution delivers the highest performance and lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for private cloud, public cloud, and enterprise applications.

The X-Gene™ Development Kit X-C1 includes a hardware reference system and software development environment, featuring production quality BIOS, compiler, LAMP stack, virtualisation and cloud applications such as open source search and publishing engines.

In addition, the X-C1 features integrated 10 Gb Ethernet, high performance DDR3, SATA 2/3, PCIe Gen 3 and USB 3, and is fully supported by leading enterprise software vendors including Canonical, Red Hat, Oracle, Citrix and KVM to name a few.

The aim of the X-C1 development platform is to enable the designer to rapidly build system designs using the comprehensive hardware and software, which the kit encompasses. The development kit includes a complete set of hardware and software features.

1) Linux OS & uBoot
2) Control via UART
3) Single 64 Bit VM Running
4) Webserver running on the VM
5) Connectivity over HTTP
6) Full H264 Video decode and rendering
7) Power consumption

The platform was configured with 2x Sata HDD drives with one being used to store the Linux kernel image, Webserver pages and Video content. One of the 10/100 Ethernet Ports was used as the TCP/IP Connection to allow the user to connect via HTTP onto the webpage running on the Web server. The board was connected to a PC via the UART for user input control and invocation of application data.

Initially the board was booted using uBoot on the SD Card, uBoot then brought up Linux to a point where the board was running Linux and into a state where a command interface is ready for user command input i.e. simple command interface over the UART. Once Linux was up and running a Single 64 Bit Virtual machine was setup as a processing function to run a full Apache Web server.

With the web server running this enabled the user to connect over HTTP to the X-C1 Board at a given IP address. Any user could access the webpage if they had the IP address and had access to the board.

The webpage running on the web server consists of a main front page with “James Bond” movie snippet ready to run. When you invoke the video by pressing play the single 64 Bit virtual machine would then decode the H264 video and render it to your screen.

An important aspect of the demo is not just the capability of running such high end 64 Bit virtualised functions, but the lower power consumption consumed when doing so. Power consumption was recorded at <40W.

The demo shows the basic performance benefits which can be achieved when using APMs xGene SoC.

The next iteration of the demo would show multiple concurrent 64 Bit VMs running with different applications and power consumption details recorded. Comparing these figures to an equivalent x86 platform would yield a considerable saving in total power consumption.