The second generation Marvell ARM processor parses ThunderX2
For a long time, the data center server market has been monopolized x86 CPU architecture, but in recent years, ARM architecture constantly sounded the clarion call to enter the server space, although not really always been successful, but the giants never gave up. Computex Taipei, Marvell (happy Electronics) provided details on the second-generation server processor based on ARM architecture "ThunderX2 CN99XX", known as a number of performance indicators are comparable to or even rolling Intel Xeon Xeon, AMD EPYC Xiao Long.
Marvell company was founded in 1995 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in the United States, Israel, India, Germany, China are equipped with R & D centers, and employs more than 5000, more than 10,000 patents worldwide, fiscal year 2019 revenue of $ 2.9 billion It is one of the most respected semiconductor companies, core business covers storage, networking, compute the three major areas, especially those with more than 15 years of experience in research and development of high-performance multi-core CPU, cumulative shipments of billions of stars, but also in the ARM server the processor also has been cultivating for generations.
2017, Marvell for about $ 6 billion acquisition of US fabless semiconductor company Cavium (Kay semiconductor) to obtain the latter's ARM / MIPS product line, including this ThunderX2.
ARM architecture processors have energy-efficient, low-cost, open architecture, broad ecosystem and other unique advantages, since 1990, the cumulative shipments of over 130 billion, and accelerating, 1991--2013 years it took 22 years to ship 50 billion, 2013--2017 years only four years to ship 50 billion, is expected 2017--2021 annual shipments of 100 billion.
It TSMC 16nm process, optionally BGA package integration, the LGA package independent, execution core 64 based on full custom ARMv8.1 scrambled, 32 physical core, core logic 128 (4 threads per core), the conventional frequency mode 2.5GHz, 3.0GHz up acceleration mode, each core 32KB data and instruction caches, secondary cache 256KB, 32MB three shared cache.
ARM technical support virtualization extensions, RAS characteristics, ARM TrustZone security, extensions can provide up to 56 PCIe 3.0 (14 controllers), two SATA 6Gbps, two USB 3.0.
It supports two-way parallel, by CCPI2 consistency bus interconnect bandwidth of up to 600Gbps, to achieve consistency across cache processor.
Terms of memory per channel supports up to eight DDR4, the highest frequency of 2666MHz, dual maximum capacity of 4TB.
ThunderX2 will offer more than 40 models of different configurations, but not yet announced specific power consumption.
Marvell stressed, ThunderX2 Intel Xeon victory in the number of cores, memory bandwidth, IO channels, cost performance, while far more than AMD Xiao Long in memory bandwidth, application throughput aspect, and in a number of cloud benchmark, compared to 20 core performance 40 Intel Xeon 6148 gold thread can be higher than 10 to 100%.
Official media also gives part of the authority of some of the test project, Java, integer performance, memory bandwidth is very eye-catching.
Represents Marvell, ThunderX2 can be applied to high performance computing, the cloud, edge computation and many other fields, highest requirements computing, storage, networking load, by providing a higher level of computing performance and ecological system, accelerate in the main server ARM adoption and deployment within the cloud data center HPC.
At the same time, ThunderX2 also have many application examples, such as the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer "Stra", it is equipped with 145,152 ThunderX2 core, ARM is the most powerful supercomputer, mainly for US nuclear weapons research.
Los Alamos National Laboratory using ThunderX2 core increases the availability of supercomputing, rather than the blind pursuit of peak performance.
French CEA Agency's supercomputing systems based ThunderX2, nuclear energy, defense-related.
Ecological aspects, Marvell ARM server platform has also been supported by many OEM manufacturers and platform, IHV hardware vendors, operating system and firmware, middleware, applications and tools.
Marvell vice president and general manager of the server processor unit Gopal Hegde said in an interview during Computex Taipei, ARM servers in the cloud has a unique advantage in the huge existing Android phones basis on ecology, can make use of the platform, architecture consistency , the smooth realization of cloud computing and rendering ARM, but with the improvement of hardware and software ecosystem, companies turned to data from the ARM server x86 servers are increasingly successful, Marvell also provided wholehearted help.
Meanwhile, Marvell plans every two years to launch a new generation of ARM server platform, each can achieve twice the performance even higher.
He also revealed that, two years ago ARM predict the next five years, 20 percent of the worldwide server will be based on ARM architecture, the proportion in Chinese market may also be higher, because China dare to try new things.
