ARM Challenging Intel in the Server Market: An Overview
by Johan De Gelas on December 16, 2014 10:00 AM ESTBroadcom Vulcan
Broadcom is late to the 64-bit Server SoC party, but the Broadcom Vulcan is one of the most ambitious designs.
Each core can have four threads in flight. Some might call it "super-threading" or even "fine grained multi-threading" as only one thread is active in each cycle. The Vulcan core, inspired by previous network processors, has four instruction pointers (registers with the next instruction address) and four sets of architectural registers similar to the Oracle (previously SUN) Tx architecture.
Although similar, the fine grained multi-threading of the Vulcan seems much more advanced than the "Barrel-processor" approach of SUN's UltraSPARC T1 which cycled continuously between the four threads in flight. The thread scheduler seems to decide with some intelligence which thread it should fetch instructions from instead of just cycling round robin between threads.
32 Bytes are fetched each cycle, good for eight instructions. The ARMv8 decoder is capable of decoding four of those ARMv8A instructions into four micro-ops. Six micro-ops can be executed per cycle: four integer and two floating point/NEON (128-bit) micro-ops.
Broadcom promises that it will offer 90% of the performance of the Haswell Core. To reach 3GHz speed, Broadcom will use TSMC's 16nm FINFET technology.
Qualcomm
Qualcomm, the company behind the hugely successful "Krait" mobile chips, has also announced that it will enter the 64-bit ARM server SoC market. However, Qualcomm has presented little else than the "end of the x86 era, cloud changes everything" presentations that only make non-technical analysts excited, so we are waiting for something more substantial.
If it was any other company, we would have ignored the product as vaporware. But this is Qualcomm, the most successful ARM SoC company of the past years. The current high-end mobile chip, the 20nm Snapdragon 810 with four A57 core at 2GHz (and four A53) shows how well Qualcomm executes. Qualcomm has an impressive track record, so although they have yet to show anything tangible in the server area they are a force to be reckoned with.
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jhh - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
SPARC and Power have had trouble keeping up with Moore's law, as neither sold enough to amortize R&D to push out innovation at the same rate as Intel. As Moore's law comes to an end, this will stop being a unique Intel advantage. It just might be too late for both of them. One can see the pressure on IBM, with their opening the Power architecture in similar ways to ARM. Both POWER and SPARC have to keep up to porting drivers to their Unix implementations, while the device manufacturers either write drivers for Linux or don't get volume. I just can't see either POWER or SPARC being cost effective over the long run. And, when others see the same thing, they aren't going to be excited about porting application software to those platforms.ARM needs to have a good performance/power and performance/cost ratio to get people excited to buy something other than Intel. They are certainly getting enough volume from the low-end to make investment on high-end parts. So far, I'm not excited enough to recommend any ARM proof-of-concept though.
Kevin G - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
IBM always had a licensing model similar to ARM with PowerPC cores. The only thing really new here is that IBM is licensing out there flagship POWER chip in the same manner. Despite Intel having a process advantage, IBM was able to keep up in performance. (The 45 mm based 8POWER7 was generally faster than the 32 mm 10 core Westmere-EX.) There will always be a market for top performance but you are correct that sustaining on just that customer base is unwise.IBM does realize that their software licensing model to subsidize hardware R&D was not sustainable. So while you can't run AIX, you can get a POWER8 box for less than $3k now.
OreoCookie - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Really, just $3000? Wow, how times have changed, I remember ~12 years ago that a single Alpha CPU cost that much (the department I was working for had a workstation fail, fortunately under warranty, because otherwise they would have had to pay for 2 new CPUs and new RAM worth about 15,000 German Marks).Ratman6161 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
"The general lower cost of Linux and open source software" While it's true that the cost of a Linux OS including support is lower than an equivalent Windows OS, in the larger scheme of things the cost of Windows and even VMware becomes little more than background noise in the total cost of operations. Try pricing out an Oracle DB for example and you find that the cost of that software dwarfs the price of the hardware it's running on as well as whatever the OS is costing. Ditto with most "enterprise software".lefty2 - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Intel has another big advantage over ARM, which everyone seems to have forgotten about, and that is software compatibilty. 64-bit ARM server software is still a work in progress. The stuff that's being worked on at the moment is open source. Once that's finished you still have to convince clients to convert their proprietary software to ARM.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Don't you think that the open source software that has been/is ported now is enough? Apache/PHP/MySQL, Memcached and Hadoop...that is a massive server market. And there is little stopping Microsoft to invest in ARM software too. Just VMware might be a bit tricky, but I don't think the software is a problem.Kevin G - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Actually VMware has said some less that flattering about ARM. Xen is the main hyper visor on ARM for the moment.goop666666 - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
Yeah, recompiling is so very hard. Essentially what you're saying is that Intel is for legacy systems and software that is poorly written. That is a large enough market, but doesn't apply to hyperscale deployments, which are the future.gostan - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
great article by Johan as always.but the argument is muted. we have heard this tune before.
the hardware might be cheaper. the power bill might be cheaper. wait until you see the software maintenance cost. custom software needs 'custom' pricing.
besides, arm has no cutting edge fab process to back them.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
You do not need expensive software to create a server market these days. Just look how many webservers are running the LAMP stack.