Centriq
General information
Launched2017
Marketed byQualcomm
Designed byQualcomm
Common manufacturer(s)
Architecture and classification
InstructionsARMv8-A
Physical specifications
Cores
  • up to 48
Products, models, variants
Core name(s)
  • Falkor

Centriq (/sɛnˈtriːk/ sen-TREEK[2]) is a brand of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products designed and marketed by Qualcomm for data centers. The Centriq central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set, with multiple CPU cores in a single chip.

History

Pre-release

In November 2014, Qualcomm announced it was developing an ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture based CPU that was purpose-built for data centers.[3] In December 2016, the company announced and demonstrated the first multi-core CPUs based on a custom ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture.

Early products

The first Centriq 2400 series of products were made available to server manufacturers in November 2017.[1] With these first products, Qualcomm introduced its "Falkor" ARMv8-A microarchitecture. The chip has up to 48 of Qualcomm's custom designed "Falkor" cores at up to 2.6GHz, with six-channel DDR4 memory and a 60 MB L3 cache.[4][5]

Market environment

A number of reviews have noted at its release that the Centriq is expected to face significant competition from established x86-64 data-center CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD, and ARM microarchitecture server products such as Cavium's ThunderX2.[6][7] In addition to competitive pressures, it has been noted that running established workloads on ARM microarchitectures requires re-optimizing and recompiling the software, or x86-64 emulation, presenting a barrier to entry for some potential customers.

References

  1. ^ a b Kennedy, Anthony (8 November 2017). "Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Officially Launched". Serve the Home. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
  2. ^ "Qualcomm ARM Server Centriq 2400 at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017". Retrieved 15 December 2019.
  3. ^ Shilov, Anton (16 December 2016). "Qualcomm Demos 48-core Centriq Server SoC in Action, Begins Sampling". Anandtech. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
  4. ^ Kennedy, Patrick (23 August 2017). "Qualcomm Centriq 2400 ARM CPU from Hot Chips 29". Serve The Home. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
  5. ^ Kennedy, Patrick (6 October 2017). "New Qualcomm Centriq 2400 details 48 cores 60MB L3 cache over 2GHz". Serve the Home. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
  6. ^ Cutress, Ian (20 August 2017). "Analyzing Falkor's Microarchitecture". Anandtech. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
  7. ^ Kennedy, Patrick (8 November 2017). "Analyzing Key Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Market Headwinds". Serve the Home. Retrieved 14 November 2017.

External links

ARM-based chips
Categories