Post by Admin on Nov 12, 2015 10:19:21 GMT -5
"Applied Micro President and CEO Paramesh Gopi introduced the X-Gene 3 during the second day of ARM's TechCon 2015 show here Nov. 11, saying that when the system-on-a-chip (SoC) starts shipping in systems in 2017, it will be the only ARM-based chip that can challenge Intel's dominance in the data center."
"X-Gene 3 will come with 32 cores running up to 3GHz, eight DDR4 memory channels running up to 2,667MHz and 42 PCIe Gen 3 lanes. The SoC, manufactured via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's 16-nanometer FinFET process, will offer four to six times the performance of the current X-Gene chips, Gopi said."
"Some vendors also are adopting ARM chips for some of their products. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) leads the way with its X-Gene-based ProLiant Moonshot m300 low-power compute module, though Dell and others—such as Cirrascale, E4 Computer Engineering and startup SoftIron (which had a system powered by AMD's ARM-based Opteron A1100 chips on display at the show)—also are pushing hardware. Supercomputer maker Cray also is testing ARM-based chips. Regarding end users, Applied Micro announced earlier this year that PayPal has deployed ARM-based servers in its data center, though most other efforts fall into the PoC or test categories."
"Dave Preston, distinguished technologist at HPE, noted that in lab testing, a server powered by X-Gene SoCs and connected to four solid-state drives (SSDs) provided 200,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second). "That's quite compelling for a low-power chip," Preston said. Bert Shen, vice president of technology business development at Morgan Stanley, said his company is testing an application on an X-Gene-based Moonshot system. The Wall Street business is looking to reduce costs as well as find a second supplier to Intel."
"Those are the chips (Xeon E5 & E7) that Applied Micro's X-Gene 3 SoC will compete with, CEO Gopi said. When ARM first started talking about getting into the server space, the focus was on low-power microservers. But Gopi and officials with Cavium said they were targeting the mainstream server space with their processors (Cavium offers ThunderX). The performance improvements in the X-Gene 3—which has been under development for two years—will be driven in large part by a new interconnect technology Applied Micro has developed, Gopi said. The interconnect will enable "many cores to scale linearly" and unite 256 cores with 2TB of memory each. The CEO said he will disclose more about the interconnect technology—which he said will outperform Intel's QPI and not be proprietary—at the SC 15 supercomputing show in Austin, Texas, which starts Nov. 15. The pressure on Applied Micro now is ensuring that X-Gene 3 stays on schedule and delivers what it promises, Moorhead said. The company will begin sampling the chip in the second half of 2016, with expected systems running on it coming on the market in 2017. Gopi said the company waited until now to talk about X-Gene to ensure that it could past internal testing. He also pointed out that it's based on two other generations of what he called "battle-hardened" SoCs: X-Gene 1 SoCs are shipping now, and the company is sampling X-Gene 2. He noted that the vendor has shipped a $1 million worth of X-Gene products as of June, and that the SoCs were used in 10,000 servers that were shipped in a recent quarter. The X-Gene 3 will be the key driver behind ARM's push to 25 percent market share by 2020, Gopi said, adding that "this is the only way we're going to get to those numbers.""
www.eweek.com/servers/applied-micro-unveils-next-gen-arm-server-soc.html
sc15.supercomputing.org/program/panels
"X-Gene 3 will come with 32 cores running up to 3GHz, eight DDR4 memory channels running up to 2,667MHz and 42 PCIe Gen 3 lanes. The SoC, manufactured via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's 16-nanometer FinFET process, will offer four to six times the performance of the current X-Gene chips, Gopi said."
"Some vendors also are adopting ARM chips for some of their products. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) leads the way with its X-Gene-based ProLiant Moonshot m300 low-power compute module, though Dell and others—such as Cirrascale, E4 Computer Engineering and startup SoftIron (which had a system powered by AMD's ARM-based Opteron A1100 chips on display at the show)—also are pushing hardware. Supercomputer maker Cray also is testing ARM-based chips. Regarding end users, Applied Micro announced earlier this year that PayPal has deployed ARM-based servers in its data center, though most other efforts fall into the PoC or test categories."
"Dave Preston, distinguished technologist at HPE, noted that in lab testing, a server powered by X-Gene SoCs and connected to four solid-state drives (SSDs) provided 200,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second). "That's quite compelling for a low-power chip," Preston said. Bert Shen, vice president of technology business development at Morgan Stanley, said his company is testing an application on an X-Gene-based Moonshot system. The Wall Street business is looking to reduce costs as well as find a second supplier to Intel."
"Those are the chips (Xeon E5 & E7) that Applied Micro's X-Gene 3 SoC will compete with, CEO Gopi said. When ARM first started talking about getting into the server space, the focus was on low-power microservers. But Gopi and officials with Cavium said they were targeting the mainstream server space with their processors (Cavium offers ThunderX). The performance improvements in the X-Gene 3—which has been under development for two years—will be driven in large part by a new interconnect technology Applied Micro has developed, Gopi said. The interconnect will enable "many cores to scale linearly" and unite 256 cores with 2TB of memory each. The CEO said he will disclose more about the interconnect technology—which he said will outperform Intel's QPI and not be proprietary—at the SC 15 supercomputing show in Austin, Texas, which starts Nov. 15. The pressure on Applied Micro now is ensuring that X-Gene 3 stays on schedule and delivers what it promises, Moorhead said. The company will begin sampling the chip in the second half of 2016, with expected systems running on it coming on the market in 2017. Gopi said the company waited until now to talk about X-Gene to ensure that it could past internal testing. He also pointed out that it's based on two other generations of what he called "battle-hardened" SoCs: X-Gene 1 SoCs are shipping now, and the company is sampling X-Gene 2. He noted that the vendor has shipped a $1 million worth of X-Gene products as of June, and that the SoCs were used in 10,000 servers that were shipped in a recent quarter. The X-Gene 3 will be the key driver behind ARM's push to 25 percent market share by 2020, Gopi said, adding that "this is the only way we're going to get to those numbers.""
www.eweek.com/servers/applied-micro-unveils-next-gen-arm-server-soc.html
sc15.supercomputing.org/program/panels
