Assessing Cavium's ThunderX2: The Arm Server Dream Realized At Last
by Johan De Gelas on May 23, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Enterprise
- SoCs
- Enterprise CPUs
- ARMv8
- Cavium
- ThunderX
- ThunderX2
The ThunderX2 SKUs: 16 to 32 Cores
The SKU inside our test system was the ThunderX2 CN9980 2.2. This is the top SKU that is available right now, offering 32 cores at 2.2 GHz, which are able to further boost to 2.5 GHz.
According to Cavium's plans, many more SKUs will be available in the coming months. Cavium claims that a CN9980 at 2.5 GHz will be available soon, which would be capable of boosting to 3 GHz.
Cavium has listed all of their planned SKUs together alongside the comparable Intel SKU. By Cavium's definition, a comparable Intel SKU is a chip that achieves the same SPECInRate (2017) under gcc as Cavium's SKU.
As you can see, Cavium considers our CN9880 2.2 to be comparable to the much more expensive 8164. For our testing we will compare it to the 8176, as that was the Intel SKU available to us. Not that it should matter much: the 8176 only has a 3% higher clockspeed and 2 additional cores (+7%) over the 8164. Note however that if Cavium's ThunderX2 can really compete with these Intel SKUs, they are offering the same performance at one third of the cost of the Intel SKUs.
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Wilco1 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
That's your uninformed opinion... Microsoft has different plans.ZolaIII - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
Windows is DOA anyway. M$ makes more money this day's on Linux then it does on Window's combined. Only thing making it still alive is MS Office but even that will change in couple of years.Wilco1 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
Calling Windows dead when it ships on 95+% of PCs sold is eh... a little bit premature. Get back to me when 50+% of PCs ship with Linux instead of Windows.ZolaIII - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
Get back to me when windows ships with 5% in; servers, embedded, router's, smartphones...jimbo2779 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
In what way is it making more from Linux?ZolaIII - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3271085/micr...Even your Windows PC, Office and everything else from Microsoft this day's is backed up by a cloud which is Linux based.
defaultluser - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Page 11 has "Apache Spark and Energy Consumption" in the title, but the page only containsApache Spark results. WHERE IS THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION?
We need power consumption tests during benchmarks to show if the architecture has better perf/watt than Intel. Otherwise, why did you publish this obviously incomplete article?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Whoops. Sorry, that was a small section that was moved to page 5.ruthan - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Well, where is the most important chart performance per dollar comparison with x86 solution?That virtualization support, is some arm specific yes i we need feature and proprietary hell like Lpars.. or its finally support Vmware? - that means virtualization.
Where is could it run Crysis test?
HStewart - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
VMWare is not currently support - and probably not for a long time - unless they ran in emulation mode and it would slower than Atomhttps://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003882