ARM chip diagram breaks through the data center market

With the advent of AMD's first 64-bit ARM server processor, ARM will bring a new lightweight application experience to the data center. With the rapid development of mobile internet technology and cloud computing, the load has become more and more complex. Terminal devices such as PCs, notebooks, tablets, and smart phones are generating a large number of different types of data every day. What follows is that almost all of this data goes into the data center, which poses unprecedented challenges to the data center's responsiveness, space, and energy consumption.

In fact, these loads are not complicated, such as Web, search, big data analysis, etc. However, if a lot of light loads are concurrent, the load that the data center needs to handle is very amazing. As a result, data centers in the era of big data are seeking a way to efficiently handle a large number of parallelized and lightweight loads with lower power consumption, and ARM processors have many features such as multi-core, high parallelism, and low power consumption. Just meet the new needs of the data center.

Since 2010, ARM has not stopped the news of entering the data center. As Google, Facebook and other large Internet companies began to customize ARM servers, AppliedMicro and other vendors began to develop ARM server chip, server manufacturers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard began to test ARM servers, so that ARM's route into the data center gradually clear. In October 2012, AMD will launch a 64-bit ARM server chip in 2014.

32-bit ARM chip dilemma

Currently, there are still some obstacles to the application of ARM in data centers. First of all, ARM is still only based on 32-bit architecture, but most of today's server applications have turned to 64-bit, such as Hadoop, 32-bit ARM has fallen behind the times. ARM lacks software vendor support. Although ARM already supports Linux systems, the supported application software is limited. ARM also lacks excellent memory controllers and cache coherency features, as well as low performance, and it is difficult to deal with mainstream server applications.

AMD's introduction of 64-bit ARM processors is an architectural breakthrough for ARM's resistance to data center applications. In 2014, AMD launched the Opteron A1100 processor codenamed Seattle, becoming the first company in the world to offer a 64-bit ARM server processor. Based on the 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 architecture, Seattle uses a SoC single-chip design, with four or eight cores, a frequency exceeding 2GHz, and a manufacturing process of 28nm, which has been fully advanced over the current 32-bit ARM chips.

AMD's ARM processor is not just upgrading the 32-bit architecture to 64-bit, but is fully upgraded. In terms of caching, every two cores in Seattle share a 1MB L2 cache, up to 4MB. All cores share 8MB L3 cache. Memory has been a huge innovation, integrated memory controller that can support DDR3/DDR4, that is, the future AMD ARM will support DDR4 memory, which is a significant improvement. With a maximum memory capacity of 128GB and an average of 16GB per core, AMD ARM is ready for virtualization applications.

Other features include Seattle's integrated server Caliber encryption and compression coprocessor, integrated PCI-E 3.0 bus controller, support for one x8 or two x4 interfaces, integrated SATA 6G controller for up to eight interfaces, and integration 10Gb Ethernet interface.

ARM's Ecological Circle Construction

Of course, just having chips is not enough. Compared to x86 servers, ARM lacks a common and extensive software ecosystem.

In order to promote the establishment of the ARM software ecosystem, AMD has actively partnered with partners to launch a comprehensive development platform for 64-bit ARM server CPU design, including the evaluation board and comprehensive software suite of the Micro-ATX package, such as the standard UEFI boot environment, and Fedora Linux environment, standard Linux GNU toolchain, platform device driver, Apache web server, MySQL engine, and PHP scripting language, Java7 and Java8 versions that can work in a 64-bit ARM environment.

Perfect development tools make it easier for users to develop applications based on AMD ARM, which will greatly expand the application of AMD ARM servers. In order to further improve ARM's software ecosystem, AMD has joined the non-profit organization Linaro, which includes ARM, AMD, and several software companies. Each member company shares its engineers' resources with Linaro. Since the second half of 2012, AMD has contributed 200 engineers to participate in the development of ARM software and vigorously promoted the establishment of the ARM ecosystem.

In addition, AMD is still one of the earliest founding members of the SBSA specification (Server Base System Architecture), SBSA is to solve the ARM architecture server hardware and hardware standards are not unified, by ARM, AMD, Dell, HP and other hardware companies, as well as Canonical, Citrix, The specification of infrastructure initiated by software companies and organizations such as Linaro, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SUSE. The introduction of this specification makes the ARM server development process easier, speeding up the deployment of ARM servers from chips, software to end products, and making operations possible. System vendors and ISVs can more easily roll out ARM server solutions.

The introduction of the SBSA standard will contribute to the improvement of the ARM ecosystem. We see that participating vendors include server hardware and software vendors. This is good news for the development of the ARM ecosystem. The purpose of the SBSA specification is to define basic requirements for the ARM SoC and to help third-party vendors design and manufacture ARM processor-based server products. SBSA also specifies ports and other basic interfaces between ARM servers for balancing workloads.

Microsoft's participation in the development of the ARM server architecture has a different meaning. This will help the existing server platform applications migrate from the traditional x86 architecture to the ARM platform. The standardization of ARM also contributes to the deployment efficiency of ARM servers, because the micro-servers equipped with ARM chips are usually deployed in tens of thousands of high-density, and standardization helps to improve the manageability of ARM servers.

AMD ARM observation

In 2013, ARM processor shipments reached 8 billion, and x86 processors were 13 million. ARM server processors have great market potential. Because of this, the ARM server processor market has won the favor of many manufacturers, Applied Micro and other manufacturers are also in full swing preparing for the listing of 64-bit ARM processors, Internet giant Google also claims to design its own ARM server chip, Samsung is also preparing to enter The market has a share.

In 2012, AMD acquired SeaMicro, a low-power server vendor, and acquired the Freedom interconnect architecture that also added superior weights to AMD. The Freedom Interconnect Architecture connects compute, storage, and networking in a cluster, enabling each rack to have more than 1,000 cores, several terabytes of memory, more than 10Gb/s of bandwidth per slot, and a petabyte of storage capacity. Significantly improve the efficiency of the ARM server, which is not available to other ARM vendors.

In terms of ecosystem, AMD timely launched evaluation kits and complete development tools for ARM server processors, and actively participated in the development of the ARM server specifications. This helps AMD to rapidly promote the deployment of ARM servers. It will play an active role in promoting the establishment of the entire ARM server ecosystem. In addition, AMD has a broad base of customers and partners, including cloud server providers, Internet companies, telecommunications, finance, and government, which helps AMD's further cooperation with ARM servers.

In addition, AMD has begun to transition to SoC vendors in recent years. In the future, AMD's traditional chip business will account for only 50%, while the remaining 50% will come from including embedded, high-density servers and semi-customized products, and ARM The processor is an important part of AMD's transformation strategy. AMD revealed that its ARM server chip has a long-term roadmap. For users, AMD has long-term plans and high hopes for ARM, and it can win the confidence and recognition of users.

All kinds of signs show that AMD's advantage in ARM data centering is obvious, so we are still full of expectations for the construction of the ARM ecosystem this year. However, this does not mean that the ARM camp has no resistance. Intel has developed an Atom-based platform for servers and released the C2000 Avoton series with a 22-nm process last year. Intel said that the new Silvermont-based microarchitecture technology has reached or surpassed ARM system-on-chip in terms of power efficiency and performance. In addition, the company will introduce SoC system-level chips for the next-generation Atom servers later this year, using Denveron at 14nm.

In summary, ARM's road to enter the data center market is a tortuous, diversified data center market gives users a variety of choices.