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from the Which-is-larger-a-processing-core-or-a-memory-core? dept.
Qualcomm this month demonstrated its 48-core Centriq 2400 SoC in action and announced that it had started to sample its first server processor with select customers. The live showcase is an important milestone for the SoC because it proves that the part is functional and is on track for commercialization in the second half of next year.
Qualcomm announced plans to enter the server market more than two years ago, in November 2014, but the first rumors about the company's intentions to develop server CPUs emerged long before that. In fact, being one of the largest designers of ARM-based SoCs for mobile devices, Qualcomm was well prepared to move beyond smartphones and tablets. However, while it is not easy to develop a custom ARMv8 processor core and build a server-grade SoC, building an ecosystem around such chip is even more complicated in a world where ARM-based servers are typically used in isolated cases. From the very start, Qualcomm has been rather serious not only about the processors themselves but also about the ecosystem and support by third parties (Facebook was one of the first companies to support Qualcomm's server efforts). In 2015, Qualcomm teamed up with Xilinx and Mellanox to ensure that its server SoCs are compatible with FPGA-based accelerators and data-center connectivity solutions (the fruits of this partnership will likely emerge in 2018 at best). Then it released a development platform featuring its custom 24-core ARMv8 SoC that it made available to customers and various partners among ISVs, IHVs and so on. Earlier this year the company co-founded the CCIX consortium to standardize various special-purpose accelerators for data-centers and make certain that its processors can support them. Taking into account all the evangelization and preparation work that Qualcomm has disclosed so far, it is evident that the company is very serious about its server business.
From the hardware standpoint, Qualcomm's initial server platform will rely on the company's Centriq 2400-series family of microprocessors that will be made using a 10 nm FinFET fabrication process in the second half of next year. Qualcomm does not name the exact manufacturing technology, but the timeframe points to either performance-optimized Samsung's 10LPP or TSMC's CLN10FF (keep in mind that TSMC has a lot of experience fabbing large chips and a 48-core SoC is not going to be small). The key element of the Centriq 2400 will be Qualcomm's custom ARMv8-compliant 64-bit core code-named Falkor. Qualcomm has yet has to disclose more information about Falkor, but the important thing here is that this core was purpose-built for data-center applications, which means that it will likely be faster than the company's cores used inside mobile SoCs when running appropriate workloads.
Here's an older article about Qualcomm's ARM server efforts.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:15AM
What lower binnings of CPUs have they designed the 48 core SoC to support? Per core binning? 12/24/36/48? Every 4 cores? Some other value based on internal interconnect and disable features?
Done right this could be a really awesome chip. Personally however, I would have preferred them design it for an AM1 style motherboard platform, and while having a reference design available for sale themselves, provide the reference platform to third party vendors to help drive down costs and innovate on board features for the full range of server platforms.
Honestly the only reason Intel still has its dominant position is the ineptness of everyone else. There is lots of potential for the x86/datacenter market to be carved up among smaller players, but no smaller players are individually making the right moves to both drive and support consumer demand for their hardware (Example: The AMD AM1 equivalent Opteron boards. Could have ripped Intel a new one on the sub 400 dollar low power server market, but were impossible to find outside big-box server products). The non-x86 ecosystem hasn't banded together to ensure hardware with driver support. For example a BIOS/firmware integrated VM (like java, not like VT/SVM) to allow platform independent peripheral cards, all of which currently support EFI using x86 specific option roms. If for instance companies had pushed OpenFirmware better, and provided a BIOS integratable forth implementation to run it on, Intel wouldn't have been able to ram EFI and its binary based bootloader architecture down our throats and saddled us with EFI on x86_64 AND ARM for the foreseeable future.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:01PM
Intel (and AMD's compatible instruction set chips) have saddled us with "management engines". Those are a computer within the microprocessor. The processor won't run unless that embedded controller is loaded with an undocumented binary blob by the OS or boot loader. That blob can control anything the microprocessor can control. All of the IO, all of the motherboard.
This is the ultimate compromise. Built right into your hardware.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.