Chip maker Qualcomm today officially announced the commercial shipment of the world’s first and only 10 nanometre Centriq 2400 server processor family.
The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family is the first high-performance Arm-based processor series designed to offer high throughput performance for cloud workloads running in today’s datacentres.
“We have designed the most advanced Arm-based server processor in the world that delivers high performance coupled with the highest energy efficiency, enabling our customers to realize significant cost savings,” said Anand Chandrasekher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Qualcomm Datacentre Technologies, Inc.
The Centriq 2400 processor family is a single chip platform-level solution built using Samsung’s 10 nanometer FinFET process with 18 billion transistors on only 398mm square. It 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 6 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 virtualisation. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 is able to achieve exceptional performance, while consuming less than 120 watts.
With a list price of $1,995, the 48 core Qualcomm Centriq 2460 processor offers greater than 4X better performance per dollar and up to 45 per cent better performance per watt versus Intel’s highest-performance Skylake processor, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180.
Optimised for common cloud workloads, the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family has been designed to deliver throughput performance for highly threaded cloud native applications that are developed as micro-services and deployed for scale-out. Some of the key applications and use cases demonstrated today include: web front end with HipHop Virtual Machine; NoSQL databases including MongoDB, Varnish, Scylladb; Cloud orchestration and automation including Kubernetes, Docker, metal-as-a-service; Data analytics including Apache Spark; Deep learning inference among others.
