Say what you will, but among the many vendors that have tried to break into the datacenter with Arm server chips, Marvell, by virtue of the hard work done by Cavium, which it acquired, and Broadcom, which sold its “Vulcan” design to Cavium when it exited the business, has been the most successful in terms of shipments and ecosystem. …
It is pretty clear at this point that there is going to be a global recession thanks to the coronavirus outbreak. …
Arm server chip upstart Ampere Computing made a big splash with its 80-core “Quicksilver” Altra processor two weeks ago, and Marvell, which is the volume leader in Arm server chips with its “Vulcan” ThunderX2 processors (largely inherited from its acquisition of Broadcom’s Arm server chip assets), is hitting back with some revelations about its future “Triton” ThunderX3 chip and its roadmap out beyond that. …
If you are going to take on Intel in server processors, you have to play the same kind of long game that Intel itself played as it jumped from the desktop to the datacenter. …
It might have been difficult to see this happening a mere few years ago, but the National Nuclear Security Administration and one of its key supercomputing sites are looking past Intel to Arm-based supercomputers in hopes of reaching efficiency and memory bandwidth targets needed for nuclear stockpile simulations. …
If the ecosystem for Arm processors is going to grow in the HPC arena, as many think it can, then someone has to make the initial investments in prototype hardware and help cultivate the software stack that will run on current and future Arm platforms. …
Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack. …
In the long run, networking chip giant and one-time server chip wannabe Broadcom might regret selling off its “Vulcan” 64-bit Arm chip business to Cavium, soon to be part of Marvell. …
Many of us are impatient for Arm processors to take off in the datacenter in general and in HPC in particular. …
Cavium has raised its profile over the past several years as one of the pioneers in developing Arm-based systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for servers, rolling out multiple generations of its ThunderX chips in hope of pushing Arm’s low-power architecture make gains in a datacenter environment that for years has been dominated by Intel and its x86-based Xeons. …
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