Marvell announced the roadmap of its arm server chip, and the performance of the next generation will be twice that of thunderx2

In recent days, ,Marvell Vice president and general manager of server business department Gopal Hegde stay Linley Processor The meeting , For the first time, it introduces in detail its self-developed Arm Server processor family ThunderX2, At the same time Marvell The current situation and future plans of the company in the field of server chips .

ThunderX2 The past and this life

Since leaving the mobile market many years ago ,Marvell They began to gradually sell mobile chips and multimedia chip businesses , Turn to solutions that focus on infrastructure areas such as broadband communications and storage .2017 year ,Marvell Sold its mobile communication business to ASR（ Aojie technology ）, And then ,Marvell And the multimedia business of the company is 9500 Ten thousand dollars in cash was sold to Synaptics.

In order to further strengthen the strength in the field of infrastructure ,2017 year 11 month ,Marvell It is officially announced that 60 Billion dollars （ renminbi 400 One hundred million yuan ） Price to acquire competitors Cavium（ Kaiwei semiconductor ）.2018 year 7 month ,Marvell Declare that... Has been completed Cavium M & A of the company , The merged company will become a leading semiconductor manufacturer focusing on the infrastructure market , Provide customers with storage 、 Handle 、 The Internet 、 Wireless connectivity and security portfolio .

and Marvell The server business unit of is actually derived from its support for Cavium M & A of the company . And it is currently on the market Arm Server chip Thunder X2 Is derived from Broadcom Developed Arm The server CPU framework Vulcan.

Broadcom I was in 2013 In, he announced the development of a multi kernel Arm Compatible 64 Bit server level system level chip Vulcan. But here we are 2016 year , This ambitious project was quietly cut down . because Broadcom stay 2015 By the Avago Acquisition , and Avago To the data center CPU I'm not interested in business , So less than a year later Broadcom take Arm The server CPU Business secrets are sold to Cavium, after Cavium Then the corresponding technology is repackaged as ThunderX2.

Marvell Vice president and general manager of server business department Gopal Hegde Express ,Thunder X2 be based on Cavium from Broadcom Acquired Vulcan Microarchitecture , This is a Cavium One of the best purchases .

since 2016 Released in ThunderX2 since ,Cavium（ Now is Marvell） The chip has been shown in many activities . at that time , Just intel Xeon series CPU A small part of the price , Can buy 32 Kernel ThunderX2, Although it is not enough in terms of single thread performance , But compared with Intel , It has eight memory channels , Larger memory bandwidth makes it an excellent choice for many memory bound workloads .

however Gopal Hegde Also said , When Cavium When entering the server market for the first time , It has become the second choice of Intel server chips . Unfortunately , about Marvell for , With AMD Make a big comeback , especially Naples and Rome Introduction of Architecture , from Marvell Existing servers CPU Many attractions have been taken away from the product stack .

Current situation

According to introducing , at present Marvell The company is focusing on its ThunderX2 Server processor , be based on Arm v8.1 framework , Current products include 16 To 32 nucleus , Master frequency slave 1.6 GHz To 2.5GHz.

Marvell The company will now ThunderX2 The processor is positioned as cloud based native Arm Application development and native Android Good options for simulation . Besides ,Marvell Think , Currently rely on a large number of Arm SBC Large equipment server farm （ Such as Raspberry Pi 4） You can let it 32 Kernel ThundeX2 Processors replace , It can provide higher performance with lower power consumption .

There are indeed data centers with thousands of devices SBC The server , These servers are used to run “ virtualization ” Of Arm on Arm, Instead of using x86 Server to simulate . We are ServeTheHome If you are interested , The actual SBC And ThunderX2 Compare . however , If you want to be with AMD competition ,Marvell It will have to use its next generation chips to strengthen its competitiveness .

The road map for the future

Look ahead ,Marvell Looks more optimistic .Gopal Hegde Express ,Marvell The release of the roadmap has maintained the rhythm of updating every two years .“ Our first generation products have been in 2016 It was fully listed in ,2018 We will Thunder X2 To the market , Next , We will be in 2020 Released in Thunder X3,2022 Launched around Thunder X4.”

Marvell It is planned to be introduced as early as the end of this year or the beginning of next year Thunder X3. According to the road map ,Thunder X3 The core of is called Triton, It draws on Arm The code of Greek gods used in the core .Gopal Hegde Revealed Triton Some information , Including it will have 4 individual 128 position NEON SIMD unit （ yes Vulcan Twice as many ）, And will still use eight memory channels . In terms of performance ,Marvell Hopefully, compared with the previous generation Vulcan The kernel can realize 2 System level performance improvement of more than times .

“ We hope that the performance of each generation can reach that of the previous generation 2 More than times . I.e Thunder X comparison ,Thunder X2 Good performance 2 More than times , Again Thunder X3 The performance will be better than Thunder X2 Higher than 2 More than times ,Thunder X4 The performance will be better than Thunder X3 Higher than 2 More than times .” performance 、 The improvement of power and efficiency comes from the improvement of process nodes and architecture .Hegde It also puts forward Arm Scalable vector extension of （SVE）, And said Marvell Some of these future products are planned to support SVE function ,TX3、TX4 May support .

Hegde Express ：“ Our current core is the classic unordered superscalar architecture , This also provides a lot of room for our next generation products to expand and improve performance , Through a better process , It also provides us with better frequency and lower power consumption .Marvell It is hoped that through better process nodes , Significantly improve frequency and power efficiency in the next two generations .ThunderX3 TSMC will be adopted 7nm Process manufacturing , In the future ThunderX4 May use 5nm process .

Whether it will adopt Arm Server for CPU IP Well ？

In the past two years ,Arm Have been promoting their own servers IP kernel . lately ,Arm A new Neoverse N1 kernel . Many people in the industry regard it as an attempt to compete with their customers . In the Q & a session of the meeting ,Hegde Asked Marvell Are there plans to use these kernels . He said ：“ We are developing the core from scratch through architecture licensing . In the realm of servers , Our customers want higher single thread performance and some advanced functions we have in the core （ For example, multithreading ）, So we plan to continue to develop our own core .”

edit ： Smart core - Woods