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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wumpus - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
This was supposed to be a reply to "X86 is less efficient than RISC".Neutral - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
"All of these new microarchitectures are important to Arm because they represent an infliction point in the market"...Dictionary result for infliction
/inˈflikSHən/
noun
the action of inflicting something unpleasant or painful on someone or something.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Whoops, there's one heck of a typo. Thanks!phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
There's several other typos, incorrect word usage, and "correctly spelled but incorrect word" errors in this article.Excellent article with a *lot* of great information. But a lot of niggles that should have been picked up by an editor before it was published.
GreenReaper - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
They're bringing *pain* to the competition! :-DAntony Newman - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Ryan : I think I counted several (6?) typos - a spellcheck will pick up most of them (there was also a DDR related one with a missing letter).AJ
eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
@Andrei: Thanks! Sounds very promising, I look forward to ARM-based solutions giving Intel (and AMD) some competitive pressure in the server space, now that SPARC and Power are either down or almost out of this market. Question: Any mention of Microsoft server-type applications being ported to run native on ARM64/Neoverse? That would open a large market for Neoverse and following designs.Other comments: So, did Qualcomm get out of the server market exactly at the wrong time? Sure looks that way. Huawei played it smart, using its development and know-how from the mobile space to make itself a serious contender for ARM-based servers (China's push to have non-US solutions for their home markets doesn't hurt them, either).
The big technical questions for me are: What will the performance and energy use of the CMN-600 mesh network and CCIX be? AMD is trying its chiplet approach, but their first generation had high energy consumption and some performance degradation by the interconnect, which still has them at a disadvantage to Intel's all cores on one die approach. However, scaling up becomes prohibitive as the die gets bigger and transistor counts get higher. I see the interconnect tech as the next big thing for servers and HPC. If they (ARM) and partners can pull this off and be the first with a high-performance, energy-efficient interconnect, they can clobber Intel or AMD just by combining more and more cheap, high-performing cores using chiplets, and do so at a much lower per-core and per-performance cost.
SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Power is not even remotely out of the server market. IBM sells billions of dollars of servers per year, and the top two systems on Top500 are Power.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Didn't say that Power is completely out of the server market; SPARC is, thanks to Larry. However, while Power is big in HPC and Supercomputing, it's become rare these days to find a Power-based unit in a server closet or rack for more general use, especially outside of large enterprises. IBM also sells quite a number of Intel-based servers, and I believe that accounts for a sizeable chunk of their remaining server business.SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
That's not accurate. IBM offloaded their x86 server business (to Lenovo) in 2014. At this point, it is just z mainframes and Power.My company owns a pair of Power systems, one single-socket and one two-socket, and we're pretty small. It's not just large enterprises. OpenPower has brought down entry costs significantly.