ARM Server Processor Opportunity

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1 ARM Server Processor Opportunity Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst April 14, 2016

2 About Linley Gwennap Founder, principal analyst, The Linley Group Leading vendor of technical reports on processor, mobile, and communicaeons semiconductors and IP Editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report Author of recent arecles on ARM, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, NetSpeed, Qualcomm, et al Author of A Guide to Mobile Processors and Mobile Semi Market Share Forecast Former CPU designer at HewleT-Packard 2

3 Agenda Server market opportunity Three ARM waves for servers 3

4 Clouds Open Arms to New Architectures Cloud service providers reaching out for non x86 processors Intel has >97% server processor market share CSPs want a mule-vendor environment Not possible for one vendor to cover all applicaeon spaces Intel offer high memory bandwidth only with high CPU performance Many applicaeons benefit from hardware accelerators Intel can address these problems with custom products, but only for large customers One SoluEon Does Not Fit All ApplicaEons 4

5 New Cloud Technologies Change Processors Microservices break down tradieonal scale-up applicaeons BeTer for smaller CPU cores Hyperconvergence merges compute and networking in one box Networking is well suited to smaller CPU cores, hardware acceleraeon Reduced demand for mule-socket systems SoC processors reduce size and power without coherency overhead New workloads change balance between CPU, memory, I/O In-memory databases need large memory but moderate compute Cold storage needs high bandwidth but litle compute 5

6 OpportuniAes for ARM in Servers Market needs 64-bit processors ARMv8 now available Xeon E5 defines mainstream server market LiTle to no volume in microservers Xeon E7 is too expensive for all but a few applicaeons ARMv8 soeware ecosystem conenues to build Commercial support for open-source stack (Linux, etc) CSPs poreng their in-house soeware using GCC APIs available for networking funceons (SDN and NFV) 6

7 First ARMv8 Wave ( ) AppliedMicro X-Gene 1 entered produceon in 2Q14 First ARMv8 server processor First merchant ARMv8 processor product of any kind 8-core X-Gene 1 used 40nm technology to accelerate Eme to market AMD A1100 ( SeaTle ) ready for produceon in nm processor using 8 stock Cortex-A57 CPUs First wave products had low performance, targeted microservers Intel offered 8-core Atom ( Silvermont ) with beter perf/wat ARMv8 server soeware infrastructure wasn t ready for deployment 7

8 Second ARMv8 Wave (late ) AppliedMicro X-Gene 2 entered produceon in 2H15 Move to 28nm improves perf/wat, but not significantly Quad DRAM channels offer more memory bandwidth, capacity than Atom Cavium ThunderX entered produceon in 2H15 Massive 48-core design matches per-socket throughput of low-end Xeon E5 Low per-core performance enhanced by hardware accelerators Second wave offers advantages over Intel for specific workloads X-Gene 2 good for memory-intensive applicaeons (e.g. in-memory DB) ThunderX good for embedded applicaeons, esp. storage and networking 8

9 Third ARMv8 Wave ( ) AppliedMicro X-Gene 3 targets produceon in 2H17 32 cores, 3.0GHz processor will challenge Xeon E5 We expect Qualcomm to reach produceon in 2H17 No product details yet, but we expect 32 cores using smartphone CPU Cavium moving ThunderX to FinFET, produceon likely in 2017 Broadcom Vulcan on hold aeer Avago deal Third wave targets mainstream Xeon E5 customers Uses 16/14nm FinFET technology on a par with Intel 14nm Skylake Brawnier cores in X-Gene 3 compete for Web-scale compueng 9

10 Requirements for ARM Server Processor AdopAon Match performance of Xeon E5 Xeon E5 is the most commonly deployed server processor need to replace Match per-core and per-socket performance to serve Web scale compueng Match or exceed Xeon E5 power efficiency (perf/wat) Requires strong microarchitecture and be within one process node of Intel Excellent cache performance and mulecore scaling Proven reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) feature set Exceed Xeon E5 in one or more areas (e.g., memory, accelerators) 10

11 Conclusions Server OEMs want more choices in processor suppliers ARMv8 soeware infrastructure is maturing in the data center Early ARM server processors deliver advantages on certain workloads Hindered by low core count and/or lagging process technology versus Intel Third wave of ARM server processors offers more choices High performance, high core counts for scale-out workloads Hardware accelerators for specialized workloads Server processors are no longer a single-vendor market 11

AppliedMicro s X-Gene: Minimizing Power in Data-Center Servers

AppliedMicro s X-Gene: Minimizing Power in Data-Center Servers By Linley Gwennap Principal Analyst, The Linley Group July 2012 www.linleygroup.com AppliedMicro s X-Gene: Minimizing Power in Data-Center