Autore: admin

Attacking the profitable server market

Today, most of the world server and data center market share belongs to Intel, while AMD and the whole ARM server conspiracy, sorry egosystems  are making tiny contributions when and if opportunities rise.

That might change very soon, as AMD is coming up with a 16-core / 32-thread Naples product and companies like Cavium have started shipping their products based on a reference ARM design. Qualcomm now wants to develop a custom SoC for the server/data center market and the company plans to call it Centriq.

Centriq, a family of SoC processors for server market 

What Snapdragon is to mobile SoCs, Centriq will be for Qualcomm-based server SoCs, that is the notion.

Qualcomm’s President Derek Aberle said in February 2016 that the first generation of Qualcomm Centriq processors is on track to sample production silicon before the end of this year.

Fudzilla has reported that the first data center SoC is going to be 10nm, just like the Snapdragon 830 generation and we expect to see some good competition in the server market for the whole X86 egosystem.

Qualcomm-powered servers pictured, detailed (October 2015)

We have been following Qualcomm’s effort to make its entrance into the server market and the company was quite clear in 2015 that it sees an opportunity in cloud infrastructure as a service, cloud platform as a service, big data, machine learning, “deep learning” and network function virtualisation.

Qualcomm demonstrated its 24-core FinFET based server last year and tier one data centers have been playing with them for a while. The company’s ARM V8 Server SoC will arrive later this year, it appears,  and we will know them as Qualcomm Centriq from now on.

Qualcomm told us that it  created Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies that plans to “aggressively pursue opportunities in the data center industry”.

IDC believes that data center SAM (serviceable available market) could grow to $ 18 billion by 2020. Qualcomm wants a piece of that.

Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies is not a new idea – it was publicly announced back in 2014 that Qualcomm is investing in the data center market. The actual work started much earlier and it was up to ARM to start investing in this field to open doors for companies like Qualcomm, Centriq or even AMD which had an adventure with the Seattle ARM-based SoC.

The next move for Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) was to sample its ARM v8 custom 24-core server development platform to “key customers” and that happened in late 2015.

The first big win was with a joint venture with the People’s Government of Guizhou province to focus on the design, development and sale of advanced server chipset technology in China. AMD made a similar partnership that increased their street value for a while, as the China-based server market is a fast growing data center market.

Qualcomm Technologies is a founding member of a Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) consortium and fast interconnection is a key for data centers as it can allow multiple processor architectures and accelerators to seamlessly share data.

Qualcomm is not alone at CCIX as AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, and Xilinx are members too.

Last year Fudzilla exclusively wrote about AMD’s superfast coherent fabric with speeds even up to 100GB/s. Nvidia came up with NVlink interconnection for its Pascal P100 super-computing thing, confirming the importance of the fast interchip connection.

I guess the next thing from QDT will be the announcement of the new SoC Centriq that might attack the market like a berserk Viking high on speed.

All quad-core parts with increased clockspeeds

Chinese tech website Coolaler posted an extensive list of Intel’s upcoming Kaby Lake desktop processors based on Socket LGA 1151 yesterday.

There are 10 processors in the list, all quad-core parts with TDPs ranging from 35W up to 95W – and only two unlocked models. The lineup is broken up into three segments – “K” series for unlocked parts, “S” series which means “standard” parts without suffixes, and “T” series which means low-power variants.

Image source: Coolaler.com

Core i7 7700K, Core i7 7700 and Core i7 7700T

At the top of the list is the first unlocked model – Core i7 7700K with a 4.2GHz core clock (4.5GHz Boost), four cores, eight threads, an 8MB cache and 95W TDP. This is followed by a two variants, the Core i7 7700 3.6GHz and Core i7 7700T 2.9GHz.

Core i5 7600K, Core i5 7600 and Core i5 7600T

The next unlocked model is the Core i5 7600K with a 3.80GHz core clock (4GHz Boost), four cores, four threads, a 6MB cache and 95W TDP. This is followed by two variants, the Core i5 7600 3.5GHz and the Core i5 7600T 2.8GHz.

Core i5 7500, Core i5 7500T, Core i5 7400 and Core i5 7400T

At the bottom of the list are four more models – the Core i5 7500 with a 3.4GHz core clock, the Core i5 7500T with a 2.7GHz core clock, the Core i5 7400 with a 3GHz core clock and the Core i5 7400T with a 2.4GHz core clock.

The main difference on the surface between Kaby Lake and Skylake desktop parts is that the clockspeeds seem to be increased. Architecturally speaking, however, the new design should give at least 5 to 10 percent overall performance improvement based on benchmarks released back in May. The chips will also add native USB 3.1 support, native Thunderbolt 3 support, native HDCP 2.2 support, full fixed-function HEVC main10 and VP9 10-bit hardware decoding. In terms of a release date, the source mentions that Kaby Lake mainstream desktop parts have been slightly pushed to early Q1 2017.

As announced earlier this week at the Intel Developer Forum, the company’s current focus is to bring the new architecture to mobile form factors (4W to 15W TDP) this fall for the various shopping seasons beginning with so called “back to school”, before continuing with desktop products in the first quarter of next year.