Cavium just announced that its
newest 64-bit Arm CPU, the ThunderX2, has hit general availability. At STH, we
do have benchmarks and a full review. We have not been given the OK to publish
them yet but our piece is comprehensive at over 5000 words and dozens of tests
and images. The company’s press release just hit the wire so we wanted to cover
that and highlight a few points in the meantime.
The Cavium ThunderX2 family is
really interesting. Instead of targeting lower performance workloads like other
ARM offerings, the ThunderX2 is designed to be a high-performance chip. If you
look at the partners in the official press release they are Atos, Cray, and
HPE, or in summary, HPC shops. The new chips have 8 channel memory, up to 4 way
SMT, and dual socket configurations. That means you can get up to 256 threads
per server. Visually, here is the impact:
We go into the history of
Cavium ThunderX2 in our full review, but we can say this, the new generation is
on par with AMD EPYC 7000 series and Intel Xeon Scalable in terms of
performance while topping out at a $1795 price tag.
Cavium ThunderX2 Key Specs
Here are the key specs from the press release:
·
Single chip system on a chip (SoC) server CPU
·
Core and socket level performance comparable to highest end Xeon
Skylake Platinum CPUs
·
Second generation of full custom Cavium Arm core
o
Quad Issue, Fully Out of Order
o
Full SMT support – 1, 2, 4 threads per core
o
Up to 2.5 GHz in normal mode, up to 3 GHz in Turbo mode
o
3X single thread performance compared to ThunderX®
·
Up to 32 cores per socket delivering > 2.5-3X socket level
performance compared to ThunderX
·
Cache:
o
32 KB L1 instruction and data cache, 256KB L2 per core
o
32 MB distributed L3 cache
·
Advanced server class RAS features covering memory, CPU, cache,
CCPI2 and PCIe interfaces
·
Advanced power management
o
On-chip management engine for dynamic voltage and frequency
scaling across the chip
o
Full Turbo mode support
·
Single and dual socket configuration support using 2nd generation of Cavium Coherent
Interconnect with > 2.5X coherent bandwidth compared to ThunderX
·
System Memory
o
8 DDR4 memory controllers per socket
o
Dual DIMM per memory controller, for a total of 16 DIMMs per
socket
o
Up to 4 TB of memory in dual socket configuration
o
33% higher memory bandwidth and memory capacity compared to Xeon
Skylake Platinum CPUs
·
Flexible IO:
o
Integrated 56 lanes of PCIe Gen3 interfaces, x1, x4, x8 and x16
support, 14 integrated PCIe controllers
o
Integrated SATAv3, GPIOs, USB interfaces
o
16% higher IO bandwidth compared to Xeon Skylake Platinum CPU
Cavium™ and Oracle collaborate on Oracle Linux preview for Arm®v8.1 architecture
SAN JOSE, CA,
May 7, 2018 – Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that
enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and
wireless networking, today announced ThunderX2 platform support for Oracle
Linux. Cavium and Oracle have collaborated on the development program, which
includes contributions to the open source community. The initial Oracle Linux 7
developer preview release extends the thriving software ecosystem for Cavium’s
ThunderX2 product family. A live demonstration of the Oracle Linux 7 preview
with MySQL running on a dual ThunderX2 platform was shown at OCP US Summit 2018
in March 2018.
The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second generation
64-bit Arm®v8-A
server processor SoC for data center, cloud and high-performance computing
applications. The family integrates fully out-of-order high-performance custom
cores supporting single and dual socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized
to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth
and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple
workload optimized SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is
fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as Arm's SBSA
and SBBR standards. It is also widely supported by industry-leading operating
system, hypervisor and software tool and application vendors.
Oracle Linux 7 is engineered for open cloud infrastructure
and delivers leading performance, scalability, and reliability for enterprise
SaaS and PaaS workloads as well as traditional enterprise applications.Oracle
Linux 7 is available as a developer preview release for Cavium’s ThunderX2
platform and is packaged as an ISO image that can be used for standard
installation.Software downloads, supporting documentation and additional
product information are available from the Oracle website.
To support this engineering collaboration, Cavium has
directly delivered key open source software contributions that are particularly
targeted for compute-specific applications, such as optimizations for GCC and
LLVM, as well as critical kernel support into kernel.org for enablement of
ThunderX2.Many third-party commercial software partners are developing and
optimizing their applications for ThunderX2 to include development tools and
environments, storage and segment specific applications. Cavium continues
to contribute reference systems for build, test, optimization and validation
activities.
“Oracle and Cavium continue to make good progress
supporting the Armv8-A architecture with Oracle Linux,” said Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice
President, Operating Systems and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle.
“Teaming with Oracle has provided a tremendous opportunity
to further expand our software ecosystem,” said Gopal Hegde, Vice President
& General Manager of the Data Center Processor Group, Cavium. “This
collaboration can help accelerate the development and deployment of critical
applications to mainstream data center and cloud end users with a range of
configuration and performance requirements that Oracle Linux and ThunderX2 are
uniquely designed to address.”
###
About
Cavium
Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM) offers a broad portfolio of
infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching,
connectivity, and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core
SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high
performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise,
Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are
supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application
stacks, hardware-reference designs, and other products. Cavium is headquartered
in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India,
Israel, China, and Taiwan. For more information about the Company, please
visit: http://www.cavium.com/.
Media
Contact
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com
