Qualcomm's 64-bit ARM server chips
Web giant is taking 300k CPUs a quarter
San Diego-headquartered Qualcomm showed off prototype 24-core ARMv8 processors in October. At the time, Qualcomm's Anand Chandrasekher said the chips will try to balance "performance, acceptable power-compute density and cost."
ARM cores are used in countless smartphones, tablets, gadgets, toys, hard drives, smartcards and networking gear where electrical power is a premium and workloads are relatively light. Over in the data center – where Intel's x86 chips rule supreme – it's a vastly different story. Very high performance using lots of power to handle demanding workloads.
There is, though, an argument that the 64-bit ARM architecture could find a home in server warehouses in densely packed racks. Here the processors would be running light threads using RAM and network interfaces coupled closely to the cores, which may be ideal for web servers and apps.
Last month, Qualcomm – which mainly designs radio modem chipsets and ARM system-on-chips for smartphones – said it was about a year away from shipping server-grade processors in volume, although prototype parts are being sampled now by unnamed hyper-scale cloud providers in North America and China.
We know the identity of at least one of these hyper-scale cloud providers and it's not that hard to guess it’s Google. The Mountain View-based web giant is said to be helping Qualcomm design its server-class ARMv8-a CPU and will commit to using the silicon if its performance is good enough.
Google orders 300,000 processors a quarter for its acres of servers and Qualcomm will want to seize part of that business. It’s assumed Facebook, Baidu and Amazon AWS will all sample the Qualcomm's device at some level over the coming months, along with AMD's 64-bit ARM offering the Opteron A1100 code name Seattle.
The big cloud players are always experimenting with new silicon. It’s thought that Google uses customized Nvidia graphics processors in its deep-learning systems, and Amazon uses Intel CPUs tailored to its EC2 cloud.
Today's news may come as a nasty blow to AMD. Seattle, which was two years in the making, is powered by eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores, whereas the ARM world today is gearing up to use the superior A72. Qualcomm is using its own ARMv8-compatible microarchitecture in its server chipset.
Intel's x86 architecture accounts for 99 per cent of data center CPUs, and has the Xeon D family of chips ready and loaded to counter any incursion by the ARM architecture. ARMv8 has a long way to climb.