Categoria: HardwareSoftware

Shipping for revenue

It has been a few years’ journey but the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series is finally shipping for revenue. This was confirmed by Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT).  

Instead of the usual approach using existing ARM cores, Qualcomm decided to develop a brand new Falcore core. This is not a simply tuned up Kryo core you saw in the Snapdragon, it is a completely new approach.

Dileep Bhandarkar Vice President, Technology at QDT and Anand confirmed that you need to do a custom design to address customers’ needs and to get the power/performance/surface sweet spot and to compete against the competition.

Centriq 2400 is a 398 mm2 chip, with 18 plus billion transistors. Considering that this is a 48 core solution, this is not that bad. One big surprise is that despite so many cores, Qualcomm managed to get the clock speeds to 2.2GHz based frequency and 2.6 GHz peak frequency.

These 48 cores are single thread cores and they are ARM V8 compliant, fifth generation custom design cores. As we reported before, Qualcomm is using its Falcore cores that are AArch64 only. A server doesn’t really need 32 bit stuff anymore as you definitely need to address more than 4GB memory per CPU these days.

Centriq 2460 – the top end 48 version of the core – has the 64 KB L1 instruction cache with 24 KB single cycle L0 cache. It has 512 KB L2 cache per duplex and 60 MB unified L3 cache. Centriq 2400 series is also Bi Directional multi ring CPU, fully coherent with more than 250 GB/s aggregated bandwidth.

Don’t forget that Qualcomm has the IO (chipset) components built in, which also reduces the cost for cloud and server manufacturers and essentially the end customers. Qualcomm points out that this is a heavy integrated SoC with distributed architecture, and a single chip platform level solution that is Arm SBSA Level 3 compliant.

The chip supports six channels of DDR4 2667 MT/s memory and can support 768 GB memory with 128GB/s peak aggregated bandwidth. The best thing is that this is a 120W part.  

Qualcomm points out that Centriq is built for cloud infrastructure and bear in mind that every photo you upload on the Facebook, every document in One Drive or Dropbox has to be somewhere. Some people like to point that there is no cloud, it is just a server attached to a fast network, but cloud sounds sexier.

When it comes to security the chip the chip has immutable root of trust, EL3 Trustzone and EL2 hypervisior. Since the chip is optimized for cloud, it has inline memory bandwidth compression and cache quality of service.

Last, but not least, the integrated chipset supports 32 PCIe Gen 3 lanes with 6 PCIe controllers as well as low speed IO, Integrated management controller.  

Overall it looks like the very skilful platform that could disrupt Intel’s server dominance and it won’t be long until you will be able to integrated one in your connected cloud. Centriq is doing really well on power and performance level and having that performance and beating Intel on both power and performance at much lower TDP sounds like a great opportunity for a big change.

Lenovo si rivolge a professionisti e aziende con una nuova tornata di sconti che termina il 15 novembre e che a questo giro interessa ThinkPad E, ThinkPad 13 e ThinkPad L. Per il ThinkPad E e il ThinkPad 13 avrete diritto a uno sconto del 10% inserendo a carrello il codice coupon th-tpe1317t; per i ThinkPad L è previsto uno sconto immediato di 40 euro mediante il link indicato.

La proposta più interessante per le piccole e medie imprese riguarda i ThinkPad E470 e E570, rispettivamente equipaggiati con schermi da 14 e da 15,6 pollici. Tutti sono personalizzabili mediante il configuratore online. Nel caso dell’E470 i prezzi partono da una base minima di 661 euro, che con il codice coupon scende a 595,75 euro, a fronte di una configurazione con CPU Core i3-7100U, schermo HD, 4 GB di RAM e disco fisso da 500 GB a 7200 RPM. Il top di gamma con Core i7-7500U, schermo Full HD, 8 GB di RAM, grafica Nvidia GeForce 940MX e SSD da 256 GB ha un prezzo di partenza di 1.037 euro, che scendono a 934,02 euro con il coupon.

Il design è classico, ma Lenovo punta sulla maneggevolezza, sulla qualità costruttiva e sulla potenza di elaborazione per soddisfare le necessità di produttività dell’utenza a cui si rivolge.

Se per voi il peso e la dimensione sono fondamentali potete puntare su un modello ancora più leggero e compatto, come il ThinkPad 13, che oltre ai professionisti è indirizzato anche agli studenti in virtù dell’elevata qualità costruttiva. In questo caso i prezzi partono da una base minima di 750 euro (682 euro con il coupon) per il modello base con processore Core i3-7100U, schermo da 13,3 pollici Full HD, 4 GB di RAM e SSD da 180 GB. Per chi necessita di maggiore potenza c’è poi il top di gamma con CPU Core i5, 8 GB e SSD da 256 GB, che ha un prezzo base di 1.009 euro, che scala a 908 euro con il codice coupon.

Non mancano poi dei modelli di fascia intermedia, ossia i ThinkPad L470 e ThinkPad L570, entrambi modelli aziendali con schermi rispettivamente da 14 e da 15,6 pollici, e prezzi che partono da 659 euro. Anche in questo caso i modelli base disponibili sono tre per ciascun prodotto, personalizzabili direttamente online. In tutti i casi la qualità costruttiva è certificata dalla conformità a 12 test per le specifiche militari e a oltre 200 controlli di qualità. Ciliegina sulla torta l’autonomia che supera le 12 ore, e che consente quindi di lavorare tutto il giorno fuori ufficio senza necessità di ricaricare la batteria.

Chiudiamo con un altro sconto interessante proposto da Lenovo e che riguarda l’IdeaPad 320: sempre mediante il codice coupon th-ip320nov17 avrete diritto a uno sconto di 110 euro sui modelli grigio e bianco attualmente proposti. Le configurazioni si basano su processori Core i3-6006U o Core i5-7200U, schermi da 15,6 pollici rispettivamente HD e Full HD, 4 GB di memoria RAM e dischi fissi da 500 GB o SSD da 256 GB.

Da notare per questi prodotti gli chassis unibody con finitura protettiva che li rende resistenti all’usura.

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Tom’s Consiglia

Se il vostro sogno è lavorare con un ultrabook il migliore sulla piazza resta il ThinkPad X1 Carbon grazie allo spessore sottile e al peso ridotto, bilanciati con una tastiera comoda, uno schermo brillante e un’ottima autonomia.

Working on a follow up

Qualcomm’s Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) has announced that the company is working on a follow up server processor.

This comes at the same event where Anand announced that Centriq is shipping to partners in volume for revenue. This is an important milestone for a project that took five years in the making. Qualcomm realized that owning both ends of the spectrum server and cloud infrastructure as well as the mobile, last mile connectivity will play out quite well as a strategy.

The new processor is codenamed Firetrail which is quite a promising codename and the Firetrail is based on ARM Sapphira cores. Fudzilla believes that the successor to Centriq 2400 series – the one codenamed Firetrail is actually a 7nm, but this is definitely not something that the company executives will comment on. Believe us, we tried. It might well be the second generation 10nm, but this all depends on Qualcomm’s time to market strategy and the product cycle related decisions.

It must be tough at the Intel server and cloud division right now as Qualcomm is the first company to ship the 10nm server chip to its customers. Intel has been stuck at 14nm for a while and there are no indications that a 10nm Intel server part will come soon.

Yes, Intel is not sleeping but it still hasn’t shipped a single 10nm core – never mind the Y series notebook chip, let alone a big and complex server chip. Intel’s CEO said that it will ship 10nm this year, but the year is slowly running out. Even if Intel shows a 10nm product, it doesn’t looks like it will have massive volume production either.

Bear in mind that the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series has 48 cores while Intel’s best has 28 cores. AMD’s Epyc comes with 32 cores at its top configurations and both Intel and AMD chip sizes are significantly larger than Qualcomm’s. Of course, these cores cannot be further apart from each other but it looks like Intel has a lot of catching up to do.

Qualcomm benefits from 10s of millions of Snapdragon 835 chips manufactured in 10nm. This is where the experience and process maturity with Samsung’s 10nm Fab comes from.

The fact that Qualcomm had some major players in the server market including HP Enterprise and Microsoft Azure, as well as many other smaller ones, the industry is responding well to the Centriq 2400 and Qualcomm is very vocal that it is here to stay. Intel goes after their modem business, Qualcomm goes after notebook and server/cloud businesses and confronts Intel. And the best part is that Qualcomm really has a good hand.