Monday, October 12th 2015
Qualcomm Announces its First Socketed Enterprise CPU
Qualcomm, which holds a ton of ARM SoC patents, and put them to good use with its Snapdragon line of SoCs for smartphones, tablets, and convertible notebooks, is foraying into enterprise computing market. The company is ready with its first prototype of a 24-core high-performance CPU based on the 64-bit ARM machine architecture. ARM-based processors are picking up momentum in the server and micro-server markets owning to their low cost, low cooling requirements, and high energy-efficiency; and Qualcomm wants a slice of that pie. Most enterprise Linux and FreeBSD distributors have versions of their server operating systems for the 64-bit ARM architecture, as do most popular server software providers.
The prototype 24-core CPU is socketed, and ships in a large land-grid array (LGA) package, much like Intel's Xeon chips. The first production chips will have a lot more than 24 CPU cores, said Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekhar. As a proof of concept, Qualcomm assembled three server blades using these chips, which were running Linux with a KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC using a LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) built with OpenStack. Qualcomm's target consumers are big Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which purchase hundreds of thousands of CPUs each year to cope with growing user- and content-traffic.
Source:
PC World
The prototype 24-core CPU is socketed, and ships in a large land-grid array (LGA) package, much like Intel's Xeon chips. The first production chips will have a lot more than 24 CPU cores, said Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekhar. As a proof of concept, Qualcomm assembled three server blades using these chips, which were running Linux with a KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC using a LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) built with OpenStack. Qualcomm's target consumers are big Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which purchase hundreds of thousands of CPUs each year to cope with growing user- and content-traffic.
37 Comments on Qualcomm Announces its First Socketed Enterprise CPU
Sup. Uhm... listen. If you could kinda make an X86 CPU with like, 8 fast cores and not charge 999$ for it, that'd be cool and stuff.
Just sayin, if ur into it.
It sucks that desktop OSes are stuck on x86 for now. I'd like to see ARM compete in the 25-95 watt space, and put x86 out to pasture. Barring something like rosetta though, that seems equally unlikely, albeit more possible if qualcomm is successful with this.
Also there are many ARM-powered chromebooks. HP has some nice Tegra TK1 Chromebooks, which I always wanted to try with Ubuntu.
NVidia Tegra X1 will be even more bad-ass: 8-core 64-bit ARM with a Maxwell GPU(256 SPUs). Perfect office PC or 4K media center.
Yes, Seattle was "based on an ARM design" and the cores turned out to be nothing more than an ARM design. Knowing Qualcomm, however, this CPU is not going to be quite the same deal.
If you want more non x86 computing it's going to take more than a half assed effort from both consumers and the industry. Course on the plus side with Intel's stagnation comes hope of ARM continuing to close the gap.