Appliedmicro display 64-bit ARM server chip

"Tenkine Server channel June 5 News" Recently, ARM server chip manufacturer Appliedmicro announced its X-gene 2 and X-gene 3 Arm server chip details, Appliedmicro first generation 64-bit x-gene low power arm chip will be used for servers at the end of the 3721.html ">2014 year." Appliedmicro has shown that the server chip supports OpenStack, memcached, and other critical Web applications. Appliedmicro's main arm server is AMD, which has released its first 64-bit ARM processor Seattle delivers user testing, and Cavium and Marvell are also developing ARM server processors.

Web hosting applications are more suitable for ARM servers, and the ultra low power consumption characteristics of ARM servers will help to reduce energy expenditure in data centers. But the current market arm new products are 32, 64-bit ARM server will not be out as early as the end of this year. In 2014, AMD launched the Opteron A1100 processor, code-named Seattle, to become the first company in the world to provide 64-bit ARM server processors. Seattle based on the 64-bit ARM cortex-a57 architecture, using SOC single chip design, with four or eight core, frequency of more than 2GHz, manufacturing process 28nm, the specification has been fully ahead of the current 32-bit ARM chip.

AMD's ARM processor has not only upgraded the 32-bit architecture to 64-bit, but has been fully upgraded. In terms of caching, Seattle has a 1MB L2 cache of two cores, with a maximum of 4MB. All core shares 8MB L3 cache. Memory is a huge innovation, integrated with the ability to support DDR3/DDR4 memory controller, that is, future AMD arm will support DDR4 memory, this is a significant progress. The maximum memory capacity of 128GB, the average of 16GB per core, so that AMD arm for the application of virtualization ready.

According to Appliedmicro, there are already server vendors willing to launch the first generation of X-gene chip server products, which Hewlett-Packard said it will be in moonshot high-density server to use X-gene. X-gene has 8 custom 2.4GH processor cores, using 40 nm process, which integrates network and IO modules, as well as error correction and RAS features. The successor X-gene 2 chip has a better performance-power ratio, and with 28 nm process technology, enhanced network and IO will achieve higher IO throughput, which will enable faster data exchange between the server processor cores. The chip will also reduce application latency, so the server can create and abort virtual machines faster. X-gene 3 uses 3D transistor technology and has 16 cores.

Appliedmicro has a first-hand advantage, that is, the company is the only one based on fully customized nuclear development 64-bit ARM processor, other companies are using existing ARM processors, such as ARM's CORTEX-A57 processor. But AMD is also planning to launch the first self-developed 64-bit ARMV8 architecture core, code-named K12. K12 is based on ARM's high-performance, Low-power Core, leveraging AMD's ARM architecture authorization, multifaceted 64-bit design expertise, and a core development team led by Jim Keller, semiconductor architect. The first product plans based on the K12 core will be launched in 2016.

For 2013 announced the closure of the restructuring ARM server chip manufacturer Calxeda,appliedmicro said Calxeda from the development of 32-bit ARM server, and designed an innovative architecture, but the server performance requirements are stringent, 64-bit ARM chip is the trend. Appliedmicro therefore will not invest in 32-bit ARM chips, and the direct choice from the 64-bit chip start.

From the Appliedmicro action we see that arm in the data center of the ecological circle is increasingly perfect. And as the industry chain of the upstream chip manufacturers will undoubtedly be the arm of the data center industry expansion to promote the role.