Monday, 7 May 2018
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
