Today marks a major milestone in the processor industry – we’ve launched Qualcomm Centriq 2400, the world’s first and only 10nm server processor. While this is the culmination of an intensive five-year journey for the Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) team, it also marks the beginning of an era that will see a step function in the economics and energy efficiency of operating a datacenter.
Is this the do more with less efficiency, or the takes less time to do the same task efficiency.. so many others i wont bother writing them.
Having built efficient datacentres the usual pattern is that people figure out that they can now doc.ore and just use up any gains with doing more this leaving costs about the same.
I think it just means that you waste less amount of energy. For example, if the CPU doesn’t heat as much, it means that less energy is being used to power it.
The efficiency gains for these servers are in cores/U, RAM/U, PCIe/U, FLOPS/Watt, and Watts/core. ARMv8 cores are physically tiny compared to x86_64 cores, but at the high end are in the same ballpark core for core in terms of performance. This means you can cram a pair of 48 core processor sockets into a motherboard and your density goes through the roof, and for a lot less money than multi socket Xeon Platinum setups you’d need to get even close to the same density with x86.
I have read this sentence a couple of times now and all I can make of it is “a step further” or “a steep increase” or anything else that would mean “from now on datacenters will be better”
Agreed, it makes little to no sense at all. It could be interpreted in a number of ways.
Of course. That’s the job of any PR team, after all: say nothing in as many words as possible so as to make the product appealing to the widest market possible.
Dunno, the more I looked at it the more it just looked like a typo. Even newspapers and associated web sites are full of them these days.
It seems the job description of proof reader has gone extinct, maybe some of the editors need to too!
Hi,
The sentence looks completely correct to me.
Note: assume that a “step function” is a function (like “x = f(y)”) that looks like stairs/steps when plotted on a graph.
Mostly they’re trying to say everything else sucks in comparison (on a different level/step). Of course whether it actually is on a different level/step remains to be seen – marketing hype counts for nothing.
– Brendan
10nm != 10nm
So “first true” should be taken with a tone of salt, as “true” may mean equivalent to Intel 14nm and I think Intel already does server cpus in that tech.
Where can you buy a motherboard and one of these processors?
I looked all over, could not find a single motherboard for sale, seems to be vaporware.
Are there any ARM based standard form factor boards for sale anywhere?
I’d be very interested in building a multi-core ARM workstation, but can’t seem to find anything outside of Rasberry Pi type embedded boards that have up to 4 cores at most, and even that with a very dated ARM processor.
A number of mobo manufacturers make ARM server mobos, like GigaByte. They tend to be Micro-ATX and don’t have PCIe slots and must be bought directly as places like Tiger and NewEgg aren’t about to resell such things. It WOULD be nice to see some ATX/Mini-ATX/Micro-ATX boards with PCIe for sale through NewEgg. That would be the only way for ARM to compute against x86 in the desktop market.
I don’t think “normal people” will ever be the target market for socketed Arm CPUs and motherboards. Nor will “cheap” single board computers with these so called server grade chips.
Arm or at least Qualy, are targeting their chips purely at phones, prefabbed and assembled datacenter servers (expensive), locked down Arm windows machines where you will be tied to one OS, and also forced to gobble down on that 4G data pipe subscription.
I think there could be a lot of demand for an expandable PC with a processor like this. Just think of anyone wanting to set up a budihrsd or home server.
Power usage is way less, which translates into lower operating cost.
Would make an ideal always on home server.
Hi,
Apparently, when a manufacturer says “cloud” or “HPC” or “datacenter” what they really mean is that it’ll be unavailable to everyone except specific companies.
The same happened for Intel’s Xeon Phi and AMD’s Epyc (where many months after release you can’t buy them unless you find a specialist niche supplier that makes you pay about 50% more than its worth).
– Brendan
I don’t think “normal people” will ever be the target market for socketed Arm CPUs and motherboards. Nor will “cheap” single board computers with these so called server grade chips. http://xyphersoftware.com/
The same happened for Intel’s Xeon Phi and AMD’s Epyc (where many months after release you can’t buy them unless you find a specialist niche supplier that makes you pay about 50% more than its worth).