Qualcomm starts shipping 10nm processor with 48 ARM cores for servers
Qualcomm has started delivery of the Centriq 2400, a soc the company is targeting for use in servers for cloud applications. The chip has to compete with Intel Xeons by, among other things, delivering better performance-per-watt.
The Centriq 2400 contains 48 ARMv8 cores that run at up to 2.6GHz. The cores are divided into two groups of 24 Duplex clusters, each with two Falkor cores sharing 512KB L2 cache. The Falkor Duplex clusters are interconnected with a coherent ring interconnect. In total there is 12 x 5MB distributed L3 cache memory. The SOC supports six-channel DDR4 with ECC, up to 32 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, six SATA600 interfaces, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Qualcomm has the chip manufactured by Samsung on its 10nm finfet process. In total, the soc has 18 billion transistors on a surface of 398mm².
The consumption of the soc does not exceed 120W, Qualcomm claims. This puts the performance-per-watt, according to the company itself, 45 percent higher than that of Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8180, the top model of the Skylake server processors. Qualcomm focuses on data center use by servers running scalable, multithreaded cloud applications. The processor is priced at $195, positioning the chip as a cheaper and more fuel-efficient alternative to Intel’s Xeon Platinum and Gold 6100 processors.
Cloudflare has run a large number of benchmarks to see if the ARM processor is a viable alternative to the Xeons. In terms of single-core performance, the Centriq, unsurprisingly, loses out to the Intel chips, but in multithreaded work, the ARM soc significantly outperforms the Xeons in OpenSSL Public Key, gzip, and brotli tests. At Nginx, the Qualcomm outperforms Broadwell, but less than Skylake. In applications based on the Go language, the Centriq underperforms, according to Cloudflare. There are still optimizations to be made here. The consumption is the biggest plus according to the company: the chip did not consume more than 89W in any test, compared to 160W for the Intel Xeons.