Cavium arms ARM bodies for fresh data centre compute charge

Cavium has used Computex to push out its next round of ARM server system on chips (SoCs), the ThunderX2. The ARMv8.2 architecture, ARM's Server Base System Architecture chip, uses a 14nm process instead of its predecessor's 28 nm. The SoCs support as many as 54 cores per socket, which Cavium reckons will as much as triple the …

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a big ass desktop chip

They should do a 32 core chip for Android desktops PCs.

Android lends itself well to multi-threading. It has an AsyncTask class, which makes multi-threading super-easy, plus all the usual threading stuff.

It's clear as day Android is heading into Desktop territory next.

ARM chips don't compete with desktop Intels, those 8 core ARM v8 mobiles chips are i3 class chips on the desktop.

BUT, I see that Applied Micro X Gene 3 chips are around 2:1 comparable to Xeon E5s, i.e. 2 of their ARM cores is equivalent performance to an E5's core, Xeon tops out at 18 cores/socket, whereas ARM tops out at 64 cores/socket. Without the power constraints of mobile, you can make some seriously fast ARM chips.

So you could make a decent desktop chip with say 32 64 bit ARM cores, and a decent number of Mali GPU cores for desktop PCs and that would leave an i7 for dust when running Android*. We'd just ramp up the thread pool size to take advantage of the extra processing and fewer task threads would end up queued.

Not convinced? Well look, the Chinese are barred from buying top of the line Xeons for their supercomputers. Which just means they're making their own 64 core ARM chips. And they're already playing with multi-window versions of Android, so its not difficult to see whats going to happen there.

* Indeed, they'd leave the $3000 18 core Xeons for dust, if the Xeon runs Windows because Windows is largely single threaded and most apps run in the single OS's main thread on one core. Whereas on Android, at one point you weren't even allowed to write to Flash in the main thread, it threw an exception, so even the most basic apps were pushed to be threaded.

[bazza]

Re: I want a big ass desktop chip

There's a massive difference between this and, say, a big Xeon.

The Xeon is all about compute grunt, and has accelerators for crypto, math, etc. They are monster chips by any definition of the phrase.

This ARM is mostly about I/O, aimed entirely at server applications that are all about taking data from storage and shoving it down an Ethernet connection (possibly applying SSL on the way).

As always one picks the best chip for one's application. As a desktop chip this ARM might be relatively disappointing if one is heavily into, say, games.

Microsoft need to sharpen up here. They need Windows Server to be running on this sort of processor sooner rather than later. They had an opportunity 8 years ago to take the lead on ARM servers, but flunked it by messing around with mobile instead. For outfits that decide they want to use this processor, MS have nothing. So they won't become MS customers.

[kryptylomese]

Re: I want a big ass desktop chip

I think the smart money would be running a Windows server in Azure in the future. Microsoft wants everyone to switch to cloud based services and their server market has been consumed by Linux.

[Down not across]

Re: I want a big ass desktop chip

They should do a 32 core chip for Android desktops PCs.

Android lends itself well to multi-threading. It has an AsyncTask class, which makes multi-threading super-easy, plus all the usual threading stuff.

It's clear as day Android is heading into Desktop territory next.

Could be interesting. Although personally I'd rather use "standard" Linux distribution rather than Android.

[Charlie Clark]

Just the ticket

for the network data centre. That is some serious throughput for anything where the CPU isn't the bottleneck, and this is a lot of applications.

I was told a few years ago that a lot of the ARM chips would go straight from 28nm to 14nm and this looks like being the case. Now with the emergence of standard server API for ARM chips I can see demand for this kind of chip.

[Down not across]

Re: Just the ticket

for the network data centre. That is some serious throughput for anything where the CPU isn't the bottleneck, and this is a lot of applications.

Very much so. And that is where Cavium has lot of experience on. No wonder then that network vendors (Juniper and Netgear come to mind) have quite happily used Cavium chips. For example the lowly dual-core Octeon 5020 running at 400MHz packs a fair punch on Juniper SRX210 (bearing in mind the price point and power envelope of the SRX210).