Qualcomm Wants Server Market to Run its New Processors, a Re-Launch Could Happen

[AleksandarK]

Qualcomm is a company well known for designing processors going inside a vast majority of smartphones. However, the San Diego company has been making attempts to break out of its vision to focus on smartphones and establish new markets where it could show its potential for efficient processor design. According to Bloomberg's insights, Qualcomm is planning to re-enter the server market and try again to compete in the now very diverse space. In 2014, Qualcomm announced that the company is developing an Arm ISA-based CPU that will target servers and be an excellent alternative for cloud service providers looking at efficient designs called Centriq. Later on, in November of 2017, the company announced the first CPU Centriq 2400, which had 48 custom Falkor cores, six-channel DDR4 memory, and 60 MB of L3 cache.

What happened later is that the changing management of the company slowly abandoned the project, and the Arm CPU market was a bit of a dead-end for many projects. However, in recent years, many companies began designing Arm processors, and now the market is ready for a player like Qualcomm to re-enter this space. With the acquisition of Nuvia Inc., which developed crazy fast CPU IPs under the leadership of industry veterans, these designs could soon see the light of the day. It is reported that Qualcomm is in talks with Amazon's AWS cloud division, which has agreed to take a look at Qualcomm's offerings.


Image Credit: AnandTech
With many players like Ampere Computing, AWS Graviton, and others, entering this market could be tricky. However, having the right CPU design and timely execution could enable Qualcomm to re-gain the hype train that went away with Centriq's abandonment.

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[Daven]

Intel, Nvidia and AMD are in this market too not just Ampere and Amazon. ARM server processors are targeting servers in general not some niche application that only ARM can address and X86 and or accelerators cannot.

 

[zlobby]

Judging by the security of their mobile SoC, I'd be quite hesitant to put a Qualcomm chip in a server.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

It is reported that Qualcomm is in talks with Amazon's AWS cloud division, which has agreed to take a look at Qualcomm's offerings.

READ: Qualcomm is begging Amazon to beta test their offerings.

 

[bug]

I am so sick of these companies telling us they basically want a slice of some pie, without telling us exactly what they plan to bring to the table in exchange for that slice.
Sure Qualcomm, you're going to be build CPUs. How are they going to be better than other CPUs already out there? Because, if I'm not mistaken, their smartphone SoCs aren't that great. They're better than cheap Chinese design, sure, but historically their saving grace was the integrated GSM/LTE modem. Not exactly a selling point for a server CPU.

 

[thestryker6]

Their server CPUs have literally nothing to do with the mobile ones as they're a custom design unlike Snapdragon. I hope they're good, but so far we've seen no real specifics though the potential due to Nuvia is very real.