Broadcom's Arm server chip lives – as Cavium's two-socket ThunderX2

Broadcom's axed Arm server processor project today rose from the grave – as Cavium's 64-bit 32-core two-socket Armv8-A ThunderX2 chip. Back in 2013, Broadcom announced it was working on Vulcan, a multi-core 3GHz Arm-compatible 64-bit server-grade system-on-chip. By 2016, that ambitious project was quietly dismantled. Broadcom …

[Steve Davies 3]

Of course Microsoft loves this

Why not when they can charge per core for windows licenses????

Oh, don't forget all those lovely CALS that they'll sell as well.

[Hans 1]

Re: Of course Microsoft loves this

Even MS is running Linux on these things ... WIndows cannot scale, is too power hungry and too bloated .... but MS will come up with an interesting licensing model for Linux n00bs who cannot run their own ...

[David Roberts]

Qualcomm testing the market?

Hey, Microsoft, lovely bit of kit here. Shame if something should happen to it....

[Mike 16]

Is it just me?

Or does anybody else think it's odd that MIPS, which started out in big-iron has worked its way down to cheap embedded and learner toys (unless you are Chinese and gunning for Top500 slots), while Arm, which started out in learner toys and cheap embedded is now moving into servers?

What's next, Windows Phone in a watch with shrunk Itanium? (Wow! Spell-check in this box does not recognize that word. How the mighty have fallen)

[annodomini2]

Re: Is it just me?

ARM started in PC's.

[Chappy]

Re: Is it just me?

As someone else posted, ARM started out as a desktop personal computer processor.

ARM was in the Archimedes 400/1 series computers released by Acorn in 1987.

So ARMs journey was Desktop --> embedded --> smartphones & tablets --> Chromebooks --> Windows laptops & servers

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF_9McTFR20

Acorn designed 3 generations of ARM processors before the technology and 12 engineers were spun out into a separate company Advanced RISC Machines in a joint venture with Apple in December 1990. Apple wanted to use ARM processors in the Apple Newton, which was released with an ARM610 processor in 1993.

ARM was originally an acronym for Acorn RISC Machine.

It was changed to Advanced RISC Machines when the joint venture company was formed.

[Alistair]

two socket, 64 cores and up to ..... 256 threads 4Tb of ram. PCIE all over the place.

.... Hmmmmmmm IO controllers, where did I leave those IO controllers... I can see a data lake expansion coming .....