Towards green data centers: A comparison of x86 and ARM architectures power efficiency

Servers and clusters are fundamental building blocks of high performance computing systems and the IT infrastructure of many companies and institutions. This paper analyzes the feasibility of building servers based on low power computers through an experimental comparison of server applications running on x86 and ARM computer architectures. The comparison executed on web and database servers includes power usage, CPU load, temperature, request latencies and the number of requests handled by each tested system. Floating point performance and power usage are also evaluated. The use of ARM based systems has shown to be a good choice when power efficiency is needed without losing performance.

► We evaluate performance and power efficiency of x86 and ARM architectures.
► We present an experimental setup that can be easily replicated with low cost.
► Key differences of ARM and x86 processors are presented and discussed.
► ARM systems are more power efficient for SQL and static HTTP servers.
► x86 architecture is still more power efficient for floating point computation.