Cavium Announces Mainstream ARM Server Chips To Challenge Xeon

Cavium has announced a family of 64-bit ARM servers that are intended to directly challenge Intel’s dominance of the mainstream server market, building up to 48 cores onto each chip.

Aside from mainstream servers, Cavium is also planning versions of its ARM-based Thunder chips tuned for particular workloads, including storage, networking and security, the company announced on Tuesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. Taiwanese manufacturers such as Foxconn and Quanta are increasingly taking market share in data centre servers.

Mainstream appeal

While the market for ARM-based servers is still in its early stages, Cavium believes Thunder will attract users, in part due to its low power consumption – it said the chips dissipate 20 to 95 watts for units with multiple Ethernet controllers and other system elements, as against more than 100 W for comparable Intel Xeon chips.

However, Cavium said it is looking to move beyond the specialised market for low-power server chips, which Intel is serving with a new line of Atom-based server processors, to target the mainstream workloads that Intel targets with Xeon. To date most ARM-based chips have targeted low-power servers.

Cavium said it will begin sampling four variants of its ThunderX ARM SOCs (system-on-a-chip) in the fourth quarter. They use a custom ARMv8 core developed by Cavium that runs at up to 2.5GHz, with support for high-speed memory, virtualisation and high bandwidth I/O. The chips, to be manufactured on a 28-nanometre process by GlobalFoundries, feature hardware accelerators for specialised tasks.

Specialised versions

The ThunderX_CP is aimed at web servers, content delivery systems, web caching and social media anlytics workloads, while the ThunderX_ST is intended for Hadoop and storage tasks, including hardware accelerators for data protection, data security, compressed storage.

The ThunderX_SC is aimed at secure front-end web servers and security appliances, and the ThunderX_NT is intended for media servers, scale-out embedded applications and virtualised network functions, Cavium said.

Cavium has been working with Canonical on optimising the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS release for the chips, and has announced that HP will use Cavium in its Moonshot servers. Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte will also make Thunder-based servers, Cavium announced on Tuesday.

The company said it plans initially to launch high-end chips with up to 48 cores, which will be followed by lower-cost parts with eight and 16 cores and fewer memory controllers. Cavium also said it is planning dual-socket designs linking 96 cores with a single processor interface. The company did not provide performance figures for the chips.

ARM competition

Cavium’s designs are, in part, distinguished in the ARM server chip market by their high core count. AMD is currently shipping an eight-core ARM server SOC, with a similar chip offered by Applied Micro, while Marvell is offering a 32-bit ARM product in its Armada line.

Broadcom has said it is planning mainstream ARM-based server chips that could compare with Cavium’s, but has not yet made a product announcement.

Applied Micro was the first to announce plans for a custom 64-bit ARM core in 2011, and AMD has recently said it is planning a 64-bit ARM product that will ship in SOCs in 2016. The ARM server chip market is still in its early stages, with Calxeda going out of business in January after having attempted to sell 32-bit ARM chips, and Samsung rumoured to have cancelled ARM server plans.

Cavium is also planning MIPS chips using the Octeon brand, saying that these are aimed at embedded devices.

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