Qualcomm enters the server race with 24-core CPU

Qualcomm enters the server race with 24-core CPU

Qualcomm enters the server race with 24-core CPU

We first heard that Qualcomm was planning to enter the server market more than a year ago, but the company has been quiet about its intentions and roadmaps since that first announcement. Now that the curtain has lifted, we can see why the company wanted to keep things hush-hush. Unlike other ARM firms, which have entered the market with relatively modest chips or attempted to focus on specific market segments like high-density servers, Qualcomm is pulling out the big guns. The company’s new ARM server CPU is a vigintiquattuor-core (read: 24-core) chip.

Here’s the real kicker — that 24-core version is just a prototype. The final variant is expected to pack even more CPUs per core. PCIe and storage controllers are all integrated on-die, but Qualcomm isn’t giving out information on the architecture yet — just that it’s markedly different from the existing Snapdragon processor. The chip’s supposed codename is Hydra, and it’s been reported that Qualcomm could roll up to 64 cores into a single stack, though we don’t have confirmation of that yet.

Based on the size of the current CPU (as shown above), we’d bet that any future 64-core variant would be introduced at a smaller processing node. That’s a huge piece of silicon, and while Qualcomm’s CPUs might be smaller than Intel’s on a per-core basis, 24 cores is still a lot to pack into a single chip. When Intel designs its highest-end Xeon processors, it spends a great deal of time laying out the internal linkages and L3 cache to ensure that all of the cores have equal latency and that cache contention and thrashing are kept to a minimum. We don’t know how much cache Qualcomm has dedicated or much at all about the internals of this new core, but the fact that they’re committing to hardware on this scale means they want to compete for heavy-hitter business. Think Google, Facebook, and other top-end customers.

At Qualcomm’s demo, the company showed its new core running LAMP — Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL, and PHP, along with OpenStack’s cloud software. PCWorld reports that Mellanox is designing network cards for the SoC, while Xilinx is building FPGAs that will accelerate particular workloads.

Can Qualcomm win this fight?

Qualcomm is far from the only company moving in the ARM processor space, but it’s easily the biggest potential threat to Intel. The other companies in this market — Cavium, Broadcom, AppliedMicro, AMD, and several others — have products that range from niche applications to nonexistent (at least, in shipping commercial volumes). Qualcomm, of course, hasn’t shipped anything either, but it’s absolutely got the cash to bring hardware to market.

Of course, there are counters to this view, including the fact that Intel’s much-vaunted process engineering advantage is being threatened for the first time in over a decade. TSMC and presumably Samsung are known to have superior cost structures to Intel, which is why Chipzilla had to ship Atom contra-revenue in the first place. There’s definitely opportunity for ARM hardware overall, but the shape and size of that market are hotly contested, and Intel isn’t going to sit idly by and watch a competitor eat its most valuable market.

extremetech.com