Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday November 21 2017, @06:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the simply-marvellous dept.

Marvell is buying Cavium. Both are "fabless" semiconductor manufacturers:

Chipmaker Marvell Technology Group Ltd (MRVL.O) said it would buy smaller rival Cavium Inc (CAVM.O) in a $6 billion deal, as it seeks to expand its wireless connectivity business in a fast consolidating semiconductor industry.

[...] Hamilton, Bermuda-based Marvell makes chips for storage devices while San Jose, California-based Cavium builds network equipment. "With Marvell facing secular challenges on its core chip business, this acquisition is a smart strategic move which puts the company in a stronger competitive position for the coming years," said GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives.

Marvell, which has been trying to diversify from its storage devices business, had come under pressure from Starboard Value LP last year, when the activist investor called the company undervalued. "This is an exciting combination of two very complementary companies that together equal more than the sum of their parts," Marvell's Chief Executive Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Also at Ars Technica.

Related: HPC Chips Abound


Original Submission

Related Stories

HPC Chips Abound 19 comments

High Performance Computing (HPC) Chips – A Veritable Smorgasbord?

No this isn't about the song from Charlotte's Web or the Scandinavian predilection for open sandwiches; it's about the apparent newfound choice in the HPC CPU market.

For the first time since AMD's ill-fated launch of Bulldozer the answer to the question, 'Which CPU will be in my next HPC system?' doesn't have to be 'Whichever variety of Intel Xeon E5 they are selling when we procure'.

In fact, it's not just in the x86 market where there is now a genuine choice. Soon we will have at least two credible ARM v8 ISA CPUs (from Cavium and Qualcomm respectively) and IBM have gone all in on the Power architecture (having at one point in the last ten years had four competing HPC CPU lines – x86, Blue Gene, Power and Cell).

In fact, it may even be Intel that is left wondering which horse to back in the HPC CPU race with both Xeon lines looking insufficiently differentiated going forward. A symptom of this dilemma is the recent restructuring of the Xeon line along with associated pricing and feature segmentation.


Original Submission

Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads 10 comments

Marvell Announces ThunderX3: 96 Cores & 384 Thread 3rd Gen Arm Server Processor

The Arm server ecosystem is well alive and thriving, finally getting into serious motion after several years of false-start attempts. Among the original pioneers in this space was Cavium, which went on to be acquired by Marvell in 2018. Among the company's server CPU products is the ThunderX line; while the first generation ThunderX left quite a lot to be desired, the ThunderX2 was the first Arm server silicon that we deemed viable and competitive against Intel and AMD products. Since then, the ecosystem has accelerated quite a lot, and only last week we saw how impressive the new Amazon Graviton2 with the N1 chips ended up. Marvell didn't stop at the ThunderX2, and had big ambitions for its newly acquired CPU division, and today is announcing the new ThunderX3.

The ThunderX3 is a continuation and successor to then-Cavium's custom microarchitecture found in the TX2, adopting a lot of the key characteristics, most notably the capability of 4-way SMT. Adopting a new microarchitecture with higher IPC capabilities, the new TX3 also ups the clock frequencies, and now hosts up to a whopping 96 CPU cores, allowing the chip to scale up to 384 threads in a single socket.

Related: Marvell Technology to Buy Cavium for $6 Billion
ARM "Project Trillium", Cambricon MLU-100, and Cavium ThunderX2
HPE Delivers World's Largest Arm Supercomputer for U.S. Department of Energy
Ampere Launches its First ARM-Based Server Processors in Challenge to Intel
Amazon Announces 64-core Graviton2 Arm CPU
80-Core Arm CPU To Bring Lower Power, Higher Density To A Rack Near You


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @06:46AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @06:46AM (#599563)

    Marvell is one of those companies that usually won't reveal anything. Even with an NDA, you get scraps. Open Source people usually get nothing.

    I wish Intel or AMD would buy Marvell. As bad as they are, they are wonderful by comparison. Remember how ATI was: like Marvell. Once AMD owned ATI, things changed for the better.

    Marvell does the opposite. Marvell buys stuff, then hides the documentation.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @07:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @07:54AM (#599574)

      Marvell buys stuff, then hides the documentation.

      It's not that they hide it; the documentation simply disappears. From the summary:

      Bermuda-based Marvell

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 21 2017, @07:56AM (3 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @07:56AM (#599576)

      If you complain that Marvell is secretive, you haven't spent enough time trying to get datasheets out of Broadcom.
      I used to work with a guy who always joked he'd never get fired, because he could get the Broadcom guys to actually answer his questions.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @08:20AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @08:20AM (#599581)
        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:10PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:10PM (#599727)

          Pretty much my point: After they shipped 2.5 million parts, those guys finally got access to partial docs and some code.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:59PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:59PM (#599754)

          Broadcom is actually now *MORE* open than Intel/AMD, since you can get documentation on the VC4 core, the firmware isn't signed, and people have successfully initialized almost all the hardware on a Pi2/3 using open source/reverse engineered firmware.

          Thanks to probably intentional backdooring, Intel/AMD don't allow that, and even if you could figure out how to write the code, without the signing key, you are screwed.

          AMD and Nvidia GPUs have the same problem today as well. Kepler and first Generation Maxwell were the last for Nvidia, and Vega on the AMD side now uses signed firmware as well.

(1)