Showing posts with label ARM 64bit. Show all posts
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
SAN JOSE, Calif. March 8, 2017 – Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), announced today that they are collaborating with Microsoft on evaluating and enabling a variety of cloud workloads running on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A Data Center processor for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
The
companies are also demonstrating web services on a version of Windows Server
developed for Microsoft’s internal use running cloud services workloads on
ThunderX2. The server platform is based on Microsoft’s Project Olympus –
Microsoft’s next generation open source hyperscale cloud hardware design. The demonstrations will be shown at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit in
San Jose on March 8 and 9, 2017 and are the result of an extensive long term
collaboration between the two companies.
The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second
generation 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor SoCs 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 OS, Hypervisor and SW tool and application
vendors.
Cavium’s hardware platform is fully compliant with
Microsoft’s Project Olympus which is
one of the most modular and flexible cloud hardware design in the data center
industry. The platform integrates two ThunderX2
processors in a dual socket configuration. ThunderX2 SoC integrates a large
number of fully out-of-order custom ARMv8-A cores with rich IO connectivity for
accommodating a variety of peripherals for Azure, delivering excellent
throughput and latency for cloud applications. The platform has been designed
in collaboration with a leading server ODM supplier for Microsoft.
“Cavium is excited to work with Microsoft on
ThunderX2,” said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM, Data Center Processor Group at Cavium.
“ARM-based servers have come a long way with first generation ThunderX-based server
platforms being deployed at multiple data centers, which enabled a critical
mass of ecosystem partners for ARM. We see the second generation products
helping to drive a tipping point for ARM server deployment across a mainstream
set of volume applications. Microsoft’s support will help accelerate commercial
deployment of ARMv8 server platforms for Data Centers and Cloud.”
Dr. Leendert van Doorn, Distinguished Engineer,
Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp said, “We’re impressed with the innovation and
competitiveness of the latest generation of ARM server processors, like
ThunderX2, and are excited about the roadmap. Microsoft has developed a version
Windows Server, for Microsoft’s
internal use, that supports ARMv8. We have also have been working closely with
Cavium on ThunderX2 to support Microsoft’s Project Olympus design so they can
be consumed in our data centers.”
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.
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.
Media Contact:
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com
