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Qualcomm Eyes Intel With Centriq 2400 Arm Server Chip (eweek.com)
Qualcomm is now challenging rival Intel in the rapidly changing data center market. From a report: The company is now selling its long-awaited Centriq 2400 Arm-based server processor that is aimed at the fast-growing cloud market and that Qualcomm officials say beats Intel in such crucial areas as power efficiency and cost. Officials from Arm and its manufacturing partners have for several years talked about pushing the Arm architecture into the data center as an alternative to Intel, and some manufacturers like Cavium and Applied Micro in recent years have rolled out systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) based on the 64-bit Armv8-A design. However, Qualcomm represents the most significant Arm chip maker in terms of scale and resources to challenge Intel, which holds more than 90 percent of the global server chip market. Qualcomm's Centriq chips offer up to 48 single-threaded cores running up to 2.6GHz and are manufactured on Samsung's 10-nanometer FinFET process. The processors sport a bidirectional segmented ring bus with as much as 250G bps of aggregate bandwidth to avoid performance bottlenecks, 512KB of shared L2 cache for every two cores and 60MB of unified L3 cache. There also are six channels of DDR4 memory and support for up to 768GB of total DRAM with 32 PCIe Gen 3 lanes and six PCIe controllers. They also support Arm's TrustZone security technology and hypervisors for virtualization.
I have some experience with the Cavium server platform.
It's not nearly as 'weird' as embedded ARM, it's pretty normal UEFI style boot, for the most part.
The challenge has been performance per watt and performance per dollar is crap. Single threaded performance is complete and utter crap, and even though it's a 48 core socket, even 48 of them suck next to a comparable Intel Xeon.
I have not seen the Qualcomm offering yet, and maybe it closes the gap. However even their marketing statements are suspiciously avoiding the whole performance and avoiding putting the power consumption in the context of delivered performance.