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.

Comments

Long term support ?

[romiz]

Is Qualcomm really commited to support the chip on the long term? A good measure of this would be the level of support for the chip in the Linux kernel mainline. All serious server processors have support in the mainline - even Itanium did. With Qualcomm's mobile chips, millions of lines of custom code for a two year old kernel is normal, but for server customers it will not be sufficient.

Re:Long term support ?

[CajunArson]

"Is it selling well? Probably not. I.e. there's some evidence that people don't want to move from 4-8 Core i7 style large cores to 64-72 Atom cores. I.e. people buying server CPUs care about single thread performance."

Xeon Phis are selling extremely well and have been widely publicly deployed in the Top 500 supercomputers since earlier this year.

The fact that you are calling a Xeon Phi a failure because it's not replacing a desktop chip shows your ignorance, not any failure on the part of an extremely innovative product.