Qualcomm is stepping up competition with Intel with the launch of a new ARM-based server processor. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family has already been tested by a number of leading players and will launch to the first customers in early 2018.
Built using Samsung's 10-nm FinFET process, the chip contains up to 48 high-performance, 64-bit, single-thread cores, running at up to 2.6 GHz frequency. The cores are connected with a bi-directional segmented ring bus with 250GBps of aggregate bandwidth to avoid performance bottlenecks under full load. To maximize performance under various use cases, the design has 512KB of shared L2 cache for every two cores, and 60MB of unified L3 cache distributed on the die. It has six channels of DDR4 memory and can support up to 768 GB of total DRAM capacity with 32 PCIe Gen3 lanes and 6 PCIe controllers. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family also supports Arm's TrustZone secure operating environment, and supports hypervisors for virtualization. Qualcomm said the Centriq 2400 can achieve exceptional performance while consuming power of less than 120 watts.
With a list price of USD 1,995, the 48-core Qualcomm Centriq 2460 processor offers greater than 4x better performance per dollar and up to 45 percent better performance per watt versus Intel's highest-performance Skylake processor, the Intel Xeon Platinum 81801, Qualcomm claims.
A number of cloud service providers and technology companies participated in the launch event and demonstrated applications of an ARM-based data centre running on the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series. These included Alibaba, American Megatrends, ARN, Cadence Design Systems, Canonical, Chelsio Communications, Cloudflare, Excelero, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Illumina, LinkedIn, MariaDB, Mellanox, Microsoft Azure, MongoDB, Netronome, Packet, Red Hat, ScyllaDB, 6WIND, Samsung, Solarflare, Smartcore, SUSE, Uber, and Xilinx.
