2014 ARM server market share can achieve breakthrough?

"Tenkine Server channel February 28 News" Recently, AMD disclosed more details of the Opteron A1100 series processor based on the 64-bit ARM architecture. In addition, AMD also demonstrated a dedicated 64-bit ARM server CPU design of a comprehensive development platform. AMD will provide a sample of the AMD Hao long A1100 series of processors in March 2014 to achieve large-scale production in the fourth quarter of 2014. Compared with the traditional 32-bit products, 64-bit can bring more memory addressing space, higher performance and more new technology support, so it is also the industry's concern.

AMD is the first company to provide 64-bit ARM server processors. The new processor has a 8-core system chip, with up to 4MB of shared two cache. Also on the chip is done a lot of integration, so call it is a system-level chip or chip processor. Its function is very powerful, as long as it is connected to the power supply, and then connect the memory and optical drive can be used. In addition, AMD on the chip also has some encryption, compression decompression functions, there are 128 GB DRAM, if the single slot processor is mostly 32GB DRAM,AMD eight core can support 128GB, so very suitable for the application of virtualization.

AMD predicts that in the next three years at least three manufacturers will launch the ARM architecture of the server CPU, shipments in 2017 will also increase to 10%. In 2013, if you look at arm's CPU shipments, it is probably reached 8 billion, in the x86 CPU is 13 million. ARM gives the server domain from different angle to bring the choice, can adapt the massive computation better, simultaneously can reduce the cost. Compared to other architectures, there is a slight advantage in power consumption. ARM chip behind the OEM and ODM strong support. They all want to have a variety of options, mainly because their customers want to have different choices. OEM is relying on ODM to help them do the basic design, ARM chip manufacturers with ODM to help them do OEM work.

Into the 2014, we saw the ARM processor in the data center of the eco-building in the steady progress. In particular, AMD and arm two companies, ARM joint Partners released the ARM server infrastructure System Architecture specifications, the specification is designed for the arm of the SOC definition of basic requirements, to help third-party manufacturers design and manufacture based on ARM processor server products.

The ARM server not only explores the hardware standardization, but also actively promotes the software ecosystem. For example, the mainstream Linux distribution has started to support the arm architecture, while in the ARM server infrastructure specification of the participants in the Microsoft, which gives the industry a lot of imagination space. Maybe we'll soon see an arm server running Windows Server or Hyper-V.

At the same time, server vendors have begun to explore arm servers, such as HP is developing an ultra-low-power server product series called Moonshot, which will run on a variety of chips, from Intel's Low-power x86 atom system-level chips to AMD's x86 chips, Even the arm processors of different vendors.

At present in the data center market, the x86 server is still the mainstream, after all, x86 's biosphere is more perfect. But this does not mean that ARM does not have the opportunity to deal with the lightweight workload of ARM's advantage is obvious to all. On a high-density micro server, ARM's power consumption is lower and can achieve a higher deployment density than the x86 chip. 2014 is an extremely important arm server development year, ARM hardware products will appear in large numbers this year, if you can open the breach in enterprise applications, ARM server market space will be greater.

We have reason to believe that as AMD officially released 64-bit ARM server chip, the relevant server products will also be springing up. Intel will not sit back and watch arm's aggressiveness in the server market. Intel has always been wary of the challenges from arm companies. The company has developed an atom based platform for servers and last year released the C2000 Avoton series with 22 nm technology. Intel says micro-architecture based on new Silvermont has reached or surpassed arm system-level chips in terms of efficiency and performance. In addition, the company will later this year launch the next Generation Atom Server SOC system-level chip, the use of 14 nm technology Denverton.

Editorial Reviews: 2014 is destined to be the most important year of ARM server development, the first is AMD the traditional x86 chip giant began to intervene in the arm processor industry chain. Then there is the arm's software ecosystem, especially the Open-source Linux distribution, such as Redhat and SuSE. As well as server vendors Dell and HP, the two server vendors have been very active in their micro-server projects. But we see ARM's development trend at the same time, also want to see ARM server in the way of resistance.

The server market is now dominated by the x86 architecture, and then the key business market by the RISC architecture of minicomputer and mainframe. Arm server is currently a very small one, so doomed to its development is a long time. And eventually the arm server is likely to become a niche product, rather than a generic standard server product category. The advantages of x86 servers in hosting standard workloads are obvious, and the ability of RISC architectures to load critical system operations is not negligible. ARM's advantage is high density and low power consumption, which can only host lightweight workloads. So the arm server looks good, but the way forward is tortuous.