Qualcomm Sampling 10nm 48-Core Server SoC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qualcomm Sampling 10nm 48-Core Server SoC

Qualcomm announced this morning they have begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualomm-Sampling-48-Core-10nm

[hajj_3]

I'd love to see a performance per watt comparison with a xeon d.

[nomadewolf]

I'd love to see a performance per watt comparison with a xeon d.

Maybe the real comparison is for the same performance, much less power would the Qualcomm processor take.
Or plain perf per watt.

[L_A_G]

Sorry, but I don't really see the point in a 48 core ARM chip.

The main point of ARM is good performance at low wattage, but with this many cores it's not going to be low wattage, which puts it squarely in the territory of Intel's Xeon and AMD's upcoming Zen-based Opteron chips. Additionally this number of cores really isn't all that useful for anything except for compute workloads, would would put it in the line of fire of Intel's Xeon Phi accelerators along with Nvidia and AMD's GPGPU products. I'd go as far as call this thing just a flat-out solution in search of a problem.

[LinuxID10T]

Sorry, but I don't really see the point in a 48 core ARM chip.

The main point of ARM is good performance at low wattage, but with this many cores it's not going to be low wattage, which puts it squarely in the territory of Intel's Xeon and AMD's upcoming Zen-based Opteron chips. Additionally this number of cores really isn't all that useful for anything except for compute workloads, would would put it in the line of fire of Intel's Xeon Phi accelerators along with Nvidia and AMD's GPGPU products. I'd go as far as call this thing just a flat-out solution in search of a problem.

Not entirely. Due to X86 licensing, pretty much any new player to the server CPU market would have to use ARM or some alternative architecture. Seeing as ARM has the most robust ecosystem, it isn't surprising that is what they would choose.

[oleid]

Furthermore, using lots of small cores makes sense for any server application that has to handle lots of requests - web, mail, LDAP... you name it!

[droidhacker]

Furthermore, using lots of small cores makes sense for any server application that has to handle lots of requests - web, mail, LDAP... you name it!

That is, assuming that they actually *are* particularly small of cores. This, of course, depends on how radically Qualcomm has made this new core relative to previously known power efficient ARM cores. If Intel can make an x86 core suck as bad as an x3-C3230, then maybe Qualcomm can make a core that is impressive when put up against more mainstream x86's. Of course, I'm not suggesting that they can suddenly be right up there with the highest end server cores, but maybe with 48 of them....

And for that matter, MOST servers run many small jobs that are very highly parallelizable.

[droidhacker]

Sorry, but I don't really see the point in a 48 core ARM chip.

The main point of ARM is good performance at low wattage, but with this many cores it's not going to be low wattage, which puts it squarely in the territory of Intel's Xeon and AMD's upcoming Zen-based Opteron chips. Additionally this number of cores really isn't all that useful for anything except for compute workloads, would would put it in the line of fire of Intel's Xeon Phi accelerators along with Nvidia and AMD's GPGPU products. I'd go as far as call this thing just a flat-out solution in search of a problem.

So when the workload is very low, shut off 47 of the 48 cores and down clock the remaining core to 500 MHz. When its prime time and you have a billion requests ever minute, crank them up. Seems to me that it is more useful to be able to run on extremely low power when the demands are low, and yet still be able to crank it when the demands are high.

And yes, high number of cores is useful for ALL workloads that can be distributed over a high number of cores. Apache, for example.

[L_A_G]

Not entirely. Due to X86 licensing, pretty much any new player to the server CPU market would have to use ARM or some alternative architecture. Seeing as ARM has the most robust ecosystem, it isn't surprising that is what they would choose.

I really wouldn't say that any of that is correct... In terms of software there really isn't anything that beats x86 when comes to ecosystem and licensing is really only an issue for companies who want to make their own chips, which is something relatively few companies in the server space actually want to do.

So when the workload is very low, shut off 47 of the 48 cores and down clock the remaining core to 500 MHz. When its prime time and you have a billion requests ever minute, crank them up. Seems to me that it is more useful to be able to run on extremely low power when the demands are low, and yet still be able to crank it when the demands are high.

And yes, high number of cores is useful for ALL workloads that can be distributed over a high number of cores. Apache, for example.

The problem with that is that when all 48 cores are tapped out from serving requests, which is going to require a LOT of accesses to RAM and disc, that's going to cause a huge bottleneck in memory and specially disc access is going to be absolutely swamped. Because of this, a chip like this is never simply going to be able to be fully utilised in a non-compute role.

[thelongdivider]

This makes a lot of sense. Power efficiency is the name of the game for servers, and someone as big as Qualcomm may be able to fight against our Intel overlords.