Qualcomm Debuts 10nm Server Chip To Attack Intel Server Stronghold (tomshardware.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm and its Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies subsidiary announced today that the company has already begun sampling its first 10nm server processor. The Centriq 2400 is the second generation of Qualcomm server SOCs, but it is the first in its new family of 10nm FinFET processors. The Centriq 2400 features up to 48 custom Qualcomm ARMv8-compliant Falkor cores and comes a little over a year after Qualcomm began developing its first-generation Centriq processors. Qualcomm's introduction of a 10nm server chip while Intel is still refining its 14nm process appears to be a clear shot across Intel's bow--due not only to the smaller process, but also its sudden lead in core count. Intel's latest 14nm E7 Broadwell processors top out at 24 cores. Qualcomm isn't releasing more information, such as clock speeds or performance specifications, which would help to quantify the benefit of its increased core count. The server market commands the highest margins, which is certainly attractive for the mobile-centric Qualcomm, which found its success in the relatively low-margin smartphone segment. However, Intel has a commanding lead in the data center with more than a 99% share of the world's server sockets, and penetrating the segment requires considerable time, investment, and ecosystem development. Qualcomm unveiled at least a small portion of its development efforts by demonstrating Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on the Centriq 2400 processor. The company also notes that Falkor is SBSA compliant, which means that it is compatible with any software that runs on an ARMv8-compliant server platform.

Comments

It's called an "example"

[raymorris]

It's called an "example". There are millions of servers that do almost nothing but run a bunch of Apache threads, many that do nothing but smtp, many that do nothing but nosql lookups, etc. It's very common, especially for companies with thousands of servers, to have servers dedicated to a single task.

Re: It takes a LOT of cache and very clever data p

[Rockoon]

Nobody learned.

Look at any standard library or application framework and you will not find any cache oblivious algorithms.

Linked lists are just traditionally implemented linked lists. Hash tables are just traditionally implemented hash tables. Trees are just traditionally implemented trees. Even sorting will be a ham-fisted quicksort.

pretty much only assembly language programmers give a shit, mainly because they are the only ones that understand the issues. Any exceptions you find are the exceptions that prove the rule.