Arm Announces Neoverse N1 & E1 Platforms & CPUs: Enabling A Huge Jump In Infrastructure Performance
by Andrei Frumusanu on February 20, 2019 9:00 AM ESTEnd Remarks: Strengthening the Infrastructure Ecosystem
If there’s one thing that readers should take away from today’s presentations, it’s the fact that Arm is taking the infrastructure and server push extremely seriously. The last year in particular has been transformative for the Arm ecosystem as we’ve for the first time seen Arm vendor platforms be competitive with the major incumbents such as Intel and AMD.
The elephant in the room is Amazon, and last year’s reveal of a new AWS instance based on their own-in house ARMv8 Graviton processors marked a significant moment showcasing that Arm is now irrefutably becoming mainstream in the industry.
While Arm did not divulge any information on who will be employing the new Neoverse N1 platforms first – I would not be surprised if the next generation Graviton processor will based on the N1 CPU.
The N1 CPU looks to be an excellent CPU that targets a sweet-spot point between peak compute performance, overall throughput. And most importantly it maintains the leading power efficiency that is already found in Arm's mobile products. Arm has high hopes for N1 and its eventual successors, and for good reason: they're looking to steal market share away from the likes of Intel (and x86 servers in general), which has proven to be an entrenched market full of very high performance processors. For that reason Arm is bringing their best to the table, and while N1 isn't going to be a core-for-core competitor with flagship x86, it stands to pose a significant threat, especially in workloads that can easily scale up to a larger number of cores.
Meanwhile the new E1 CPU targets the expanding market for high throughput processors, which with the upcoming shift to 5G will require more throughput performance at low power levels. Here Arm seems to have custom-tailored a CPU specifically to serve such use-cases. This is a move that's arguably less about stealing market share from any one player, and more about being in the right place at the right time to secure their place in what should be a rapidly growing market. In that sense the E1 is a very traditional Arm move – focus on cost and simpler processors – and this has been a move that's continued to serve Arm well over the years.
Although the new hardware IP is impressive, what also matters greatly is Arm’s efforts into strengthening the Arm software ecosystem. Working with various industry hardware and software partners in trying to facilitate the software stack and interoperability with Arm not only benefits vendors using Arm’s own hardware IP, but also vendors who chose the route of employing their own custom CPU and SoC designs. Similarly, those vendors who are trying to improve and strengthen their own products will inevitably feed back into strengthening the Arm ecosystem as well – creating essentially what is a group effort between many companies that in the future will continue to gain momentum.
It's said that the Neoverse N1 will be commercially deployed by partners in the next 12-18 months, and I think this will be a crucial moment for Arm and the company’s server endeavours. If the major breakthrough in mind-share hasn’t already happened, if all goes well and Arm and partners deliver on the promised improvements, the next 1-2 years will certainly represent a major shift in the industry.
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surt - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
That raw power comes at a .... power cost. And as soon as you try to start z-stacking your cpus that power is going to be the most important factor.peevee - Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - link
"The future is way more related to modularity than the chip architecture."Debatable. Both ARM and x64 are essentially the same in terms of efficiency if the same levels of performance are required. A breakthrough can only come from in-memory computing, which neither ARM nor x64 can sustain for many reasons.
rahvin - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
ARM is not "more efficient at every level". That's just plain fanboi BS. The architecture is the least important aspect of any processor these days.ARM processors were traditionally designed for power efficiency above all else, now that Intel is designing down for efficiency and ARM is designing up for power there will likely be some real competition but so far ARM has not demonstrated that they can provide equivalent power for the same power budget at the high end and Intel has had difficulty matching the lower power budget and performance on the low end (though this is likely due to them wishing to avoid cannibalizing higher end products with performant low power versions).
As ARM tries to enter the server market we'll finally see if they can provide something equivalent, but it's not been a hopeful showing given that all but one ARM server design has been canceled and it's not equivalent to an x86 server processor of the same character in either power or performance.
Wilco1 - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
Today you can buy Arm-based servers like Operon A1100, Centriq, ThunderX, ThunderX2, eMAG and HiSilicon. The first Arm supercomputer entered the TOP500 list recently, and Fujitsu has prototypes of their Post-K computer. You can buy Arm compute time from several cloud vendors today, including AWS. That all adds up to one Arm server in your book?rahvin - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
ThunderX is gone, displaced by the ThunderX2 which is the Centriq processor after it was abandoned by it's creator. eMAG, A1100 and the HiSilicon Last I saw are all canceled.Commercially you can buy one ARM server, the ThunderX2. Go ahead, TRY to buy one.
Wilco1 - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
How could you be so clueless? ThunderX2 is based on Vulcan made by Broadcomm, no relation with Centriq at all. ThunderX is still being used and sold. Centriq is still being sold, a few months ago Gigabyte announced a brand new motherboard for it. eMAG is just announced. HiSilicon/Huawei has 2 generations of Arm servers already and is working on several more. That's the only one that isn't for sale outside of China according to AnandTech.What's next? Are you going to tell us that Arm servers did not beat Xeon and SkyLake in various benchmarks, eventhough the evidence was published in an article on AnandTech?
rahvin - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
Your right I confused the Vulcan and the Centriq. The Centriq is dead, the design teams gone,and there is no plan to even spin the silicon from what I've seen. Qualacom abandoned the product under threat from an activist investor. Yea there was a motherboard at CES but that doesn't mean anything at all and there is literally no way to buy one.ThunderX is depreciated (show me where you can buy one, they depreciated the silicon over a year ago, there may still be some inventory out there but I seriously doubt it), ThunderX2 is available, and from everything I saw it's awful. The best work case was as a nginx master server because the compute capacity was so awful. Basically you need a workload with a lot of threads and no actual work to even make it worth anything at all, especially considering the price.
The Huawei junk is a nonstarter, you can't buy it anywhere but China that I've seen and it's not exactly flying off the shelves either. I've seen more ARM servers announced and canceled a year later than any that made it off the shelves into an actual product. So there is an eMag, that's great show me where you can buy it.
That's my point, you can't buy them, other than the ThunderX2 or the Huawei if you want to go to china to get it. The Arm server has been a flash in the pan and I have no doubt it will continue to be so.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
one has to wonder: given the existence of C compilers for any ISA, and thus *nix OS for said ISA, when (or already?) will the maths dictate both the 'optimal' ISA and underlying microarch? both, after all, are just maths optimization problems. to some delta, there is a unique solution.zmatt - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Baring any major design flaws there shouldn't really be a difference in theoretical performance between ISAs. Its important to note that the ISA isn't the actual logic of the chip, its better thought of as a paper standard a given chip needs to conform to if it wants to be binary compatible. The real determination in performance is the microarchitecture. People conflate this with ISA a lot because they are both architectures but the Micro arch is what describes the actual logic design in the circuit. That is what Intel and AMD apply codenames to. So things like Skylake, Thunderbird, Cortex A53 etc are micro architectures.Wilco1 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
There certainly are differences between ISAs which cannot be overcome with micro-architecture no matter how much money, power or transistors you throw at it. Given equal resources, the best possible implementations of various ISAs will exhibit major performance differences.