Qualcomm is developing chips for ARM-based servers to run the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. At the conference, it conducted conducted the first public demonstration of Windows Server, developed for Microsoft’s internal use, powered by the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor.
Qualcomm submitted a server specification using its 10nm 2400 platform to OCP. This pairs Qualcomm's recently announced 10nm, 48-core server processor with the advanced interfaces for memory, network, and peripherals, enabling the OCP community to access and design ARM-based servers for the most common cloud compute workloads. As part of the contribution, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies joined the OCP Foundation as a gold member.
Cavium is collaborating with Microsoft on enabling a variety of cloud workloads running on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A Data Center processor for the Microsoft Azure platform. The companies are also demonstrating at the OCP Summit web services on a version of Windows Server developed for Microsoft’s internal use running cloud services workloads on ThunderX2.
The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second generation 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor SoCs for data centre, cloud and HPC applications. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple workload optimized SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as ARM's SBSA and SBBR standards. It is also widely supported by leading OS, Hypervisor and SW tool and application vendors, Cavium said.
Both the Cavium and Qualcomm products were developed to work with Microsoft’s Project Olympus, its open source hyperscale server design for cloud services. AMD also announced its new 'Naples' processor for Olympus at the summit. Naples delivers the "Zen" x86 processing engine in configurations of up to 32 cores and is scheduled to be available in Q2.
