
Qualcomm Demos 48-Core Centriq 2400 Server SoC in Action, Begins Sampling - SoapSeller
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10918/qualcomm-demos-48core-centriq-2400-server-soc-in-action-begins-sampling
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baybal2
I remember from my work in an ad startup revjet.

On one meeting we had a typical discussion with ops guys:

\- "why wouldn't we optimise our hardware utilisation by doing things a, b,
and c."

\- "hardware is crap cheap these days. If you need more capacity, just throw
more servers at that"

\- "is $24k a month in new servers crap cheap by your measure?"

\- "comparatively to the amount of how much money these servers will make the
same month, it is crap cheap. It is just a little less than an annual cost of
mid-tier software dev in Russian office. We account only 12% increase in our
revenue due to algorithmic improvements and almost 80 to more traffic we
handle. A new server pays back the same month, and you and other devs pay off
only in 2 years"

This pretty much summarises the viewpoint of a typical "big dot com ops
manager" on hardware these days

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late2part
This is somewhat true. However, raising gross margin by cutting depreciation
is a good thing. And throw in "green" for karma points. Using hardware that
takes less space and power with more performance will get most good 'big dot
com ops managers' happier.

~~~
kikoreis
Except a new architecture brings with it non-trivial software compat and
operational overhead. If you are 100% in control of your software the former
is manageable, but how many of us really are?

The trick here is to make the new platform attractive enough it survives the
stupid test, i.e. I'd be stupid not to try this out! That implies either very
cheap or very fast or.. both. I presented on this at Linaro Connect USA in
2014: [https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/leg-
keynotekiko-...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/leg-keynotekiko-
lcu2014mythology-v2)

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swiley
I wonder if people will actually get documentation for these, unlike many of
their other devices. I'd hate to see server kerenels end up as much a wreck as
phone kernels.

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rwmj
I can't really go into details because of NDAs (oh the irony) but these
machines will boot fully open source and upstream kernels out of the box. We
are very much trying to avoid the problems encountered with phone-grade ARM
chips.

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userbinator
Will there be datasheets and other programming documentation available? ARM
core documentation is, but everything else on the SoC is also important. Just
because there is open-source code for it doesn't mean it's been documented,
because the code only shows "how" and not "why".

Qualcomm is notoriously closed with docs, about the same as Broadcom. Intel is
starting to close up, but is still more open because of the x86/PC legacy.

~~~
rwmj
I don't know (and if I did know, I couldn't say at present).

However the points raised in this subthread are absolutely correct. Having
upstream kernel support is vital so that any distro boots on any h/w and so
that security fixes can be applied. Having good quality drivers is important,
and documentation very helpful too.

Red Hat is taking the high road here and working with server manufacturers to
make sure that upstream kernels work painlessly on ARM server hardware. We
don't think that ARM in the datacenter can be a success otherwise.

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faragon
In my opinion, the way for ARM to succeed in the server space is:

1) One quarter the price for equivalent performance for server task (e.g. 500
USD for 48-core Qualcomm vs 2000 USD for 16-core (32-thread) Intel). E.g. the
problem of 48-core Cavium ARM chip was poor performance, that could be fixed
by Qualcomm, with better IPC (big enough L3 cache, and 3 or 4 OooE).

2) One quarter the power usage

3) Reliable and affordable motherboards

4) Devices at similar price vs Intel ecosystem (high performance Ethernet,
Infiniband, PCI-E SDD, etc.)

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dom0
"One quarter the price" ... "One quarter the power usage" ...

The first is very unrealistic because this is a market and ARM chip makers
aren't Santa Clause, the second seems very, very unrealistic, because Intel
already has the most efficient "big iron"-ish CPUs (just compare SAP
benchmarks vs. power usage of Intel-based vs. POWER-based systems, for
instance), and have been under continuous pressure for more than a decade to
make things more efficient (because energy use and costs following from it are
a major cost factor for all of Intel's biggest server customers). That alone
doesn't mean that it's not possible to be better, of course, but it's a strong
hint that if no one else managed to get close to Intel there that it maybe is
a hard thing to pull off. In any case I think a four-fold efficiency increase
is expecting way too much.

10 % better power efficiency at the same performance level per unit would
already signal a huge win for ARM.

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kikoreis
No, actually he is exactly right. 10% better would made no difference to the
typical buyer, and to complicate any TCO guesstimate would need to take into
account managing a new arch in a deployment, which comes with its own hard to
measure overheads.

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dom0
Define "typical buyer". 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a
reason for FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds,
especially if the vendor can plausibly show that they have more potential
there.

These are servers, not hypedisruptionmarkets. Not once where there 400 %
efficiency increases in a single generation of anything.

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djrogers
> 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a reason for
> FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds

I'm not sure the upfront effort/cost would be worth it for that savings alone,
especially when Intel will just come along and say they'll have that savings
in an x86 chip in 9 months without any software dev required.

What this _could_ do for the big DC companies though, is provide them a lever
to keep Intel on that path. That lever alone might be worth all the dev effort
required to support 2 architectures in a DC for some customers - and even if
it's not worth it empirically, it may make them feel like it is.

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rshm
Except the core counts, no other specs like frequency, power or cache. Are
there any qualcomm docs.

~~~
hehheh
No specs, no benchmarks, no looking inside the case..

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rwmj
When they're available to buy, which is not long away, you'll be able to find
out all that. The cases aren't going to be welded shut :-)

It's not surprising that Qualcomm don't publish this because they themselves
probably don't know the yields from each bin in the final process.

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kenOfYugen
What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to
take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

Are there any real-life experiences? Would a different TCP stack such as
mTCP[1] suffice?

1\. [http://shader.kaist.edu/mtcp/](http://shader.kaist.edu/mtcp/)

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dom0
> What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to
> take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/) isn't a joke.

Linux is the default operating system of _huge_ NUMA systems with hundreds of
CPUs / thousands of cores.

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loeg
They have put quite a bit of work into scaling, but that doesn't mean it's
perfect yet.

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loeg
If you like 48+ core ARM servers, Cavium's ThunderX offering has been
available for some time.

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qaq
Cavium is about on par with an old e5-2670 that is about $90 on ebay. So while
at some future point arm server chips will likely be a good value Cavium's
ThunderX is def. not it.

~~~
loeg
Do you believe Qualcomm's will be any better value?

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qaq
No clue I guess we need to wait for benchmarks

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pier25
I read somewhere that ARM was growing fast because it hadn't been as
thoroughly developed as x86 in the past. So right now ARM manufacturers were
catching the lowest hanging fruit, so to speak.

Is ARM going to hit a limit soon like x86 has?

Also in the comments of the article someone says that the x86 architecture is
outdated vs SOC architecture.

Is this true? Does this mean we'll see SOC on desktop in the near future?

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wmf
Yes, the specs of Centriq and Vulcan are probably similar enough to Skylake
that there's no catching up left for them to do. At best they could advance at
a similar pace to Intel/IBM.

When it comes to the desktop, Intel is driven more by business concerns than
technology. Putting the southbridge on the processor doesn't have that much
advantage, but AFAIK Zen can run by itself with no external southbridge to
some extent.

~~~
kikoreis
Well, Vulcan is now kaput, Seattle seems disowned and X-Gene is up for grabs,
so only Qualcomm and Cavium remain as contenders in the server SoC space. I
predict they still have a solid shot but it will require a lot of
uncomfortable adjustments along the way.

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monk_e_boy
I wonder if the number of cores and threaded will now follow a similar law to
Mores Law. 18 months seems too quick, maybe doubling every 8 years...

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cobookman
Moore's law states transistor count doubles approx every two years. So if that
keeps up either you'll see more shrinking of computer size, utilization of the
new transistors per square inch, or both.

