Showing posts with label arm 64. 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
Perhaps this will succeed where Windows RT failed.
Microsoft dipped its toe in the ARM waters with Windows RT but it ultimately proved a failure, primarily because of the lack of applications. That doesn't mean the company is going to give up on the dominant mobile market processor, however.
At the WinHEC show in China last week, Microsoft announced it has finally created a native version of Windows 10 running on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors with full x86 compatibility. This isn't Windows RT, it's full Windows 10, but you’ll be able to run Win32 apps and Windows Universal Apps.
The initial version of ARM Windows 10 only supports 32-bit apps, but that's not a big deal since most mobile devices have 4GB of memory or less anyway. And it should be noted this is Windows 10 on Snapdragon, not Windows 10 on ARM. Sure, Qualcomm's processors are fairly ubiquitous but they aren't everywhere. You won't be running Windows 10 on an iPad any time soon.
This enables Microsoft to get down into the lower-cost mobile market. The Surface tablets and notebooks are nice but they aren't cheap. That's partly due to being essentially x86 PCs. An ARM-based tablet has an overall lower cost of materials and lower price, so it gets Windows into places Microsoft currently isn't playing with the Surface line.
"For the first time ever, our customers will be able to experience the Windows they know with all the apps, peripherals, and enterprise capabilities they require, on a truly mobile, power efficient, always-connected cellular PC," said Windows chief Terry Myerson in a blog post announcing the breakthrough, along with other WinHEC news.
"With Windows 10 on cellular PCs, we will help everyone make the most of the air around them. We look forward to seeing these new devices with integrated cellular connectivity and the great experiences people love like touch, pen and Windows Hello, in market as early as next year," he added.
PCWorld (a sister publication of Computerworld) reports that the emulation will be built around a new, unreleased chip the Snapdragon 835 that's in production now and is due to ship in the first half of 2017, according to Qualcomm. The first Windows-on-ARM devices are expected by the second half of next year.
This will be a major challenge for Qualcomm. Emulation is always tricky business. Remember Transmeta? The difference here is Intel has basically given up on the mobile market. It bailed out of the tablet and smartphone business last year, basically handing it to ARM. So at least they don't have to deal with Intel on the hardware side.
But Qualcomm still faces a considerable challenge of ARM-to-x86 emulation. We don't know anything on the performance specs of the 835, only that it's a 10nm part.
