
Qualcomm Maps Out ARM Datacenter Battle Plan - scaleupandout
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/02/12/arm-servers-qualcomm-maps-out-datacenter-battle-plan/
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trsohmers
I do have a horse in this race, but even if I didn't I would say this:

Does Qualcomm, a company which has laid off ~20% of its workforce with even
more jumping ship, 48% year over year revenue decline (as well as 44% profit
decline, even after layoffs), increasingly difficult time differentiating
itself from its competitors (who are in key areas starting to do better than
them), really think they are going to be able to quadruple their total
earnings in purely through new markets? All in under 4 years? Do they not
realize that both their existing market as well the magic "IoT" market that
they think will save them has even lower margins and more competition then the
market they are in now.

Or since this was an investors meeting, shall we assume Occam's razor and are
they just trying to prop up their stock that has dropped to half its value
(and still trending downwards) in the midst of internal turmoil and losing
marketshare.

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nickpsecurity
Not to mention the CPU choice is one of easiest parts of making a datacenter
company. I'm not counting heterogenous ones customized to workloads like I've
always advocated: just typical put work or VM's on Intel/AMD CPU's. What they
need to do, from marketing to operations to internetworking, to outperform
major players in datacenters is huge and not in their direct expertise.

I could see them establishing new revenue by making some custom SOC's for host
workloads, I/O offloading, and networking analysis. There's already companies
and academics in this space but barely tapping the potential. They could bring
in some big bucks putting their engineering talent into some already proven
methods. Not going to solve their company's problems, though. Too big haha.

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ksec
I thought Xeon-D already solve that SOC problem you mentioned.

AMD's ZEN is the closest to get Intel some competition. The margin on Xeon
product line are huge, making plenty of room for AMD to strike. And since the
Cloud is still a growing market, I could see Intel lowering price and AMD
still enjoying some success in it.

This scenario should make it even harder for Qualcomm, or any ARM maker to set
foot in server market.

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nickpsecurity
I didn't know about it. Thanks for mention. My baseline for this topic of
SOC's w/ offloading is Cavium's Octeon line:

[http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-III_CN7XXX.html](http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-
III_CN7XXX.html)

The summary should give you an idea. Just offloading TCP/IP or filesystem ops
by itself can knock a host CPU down from 90+% utilization to closer to 10%.
That leaves a lot of room for compute. Such a situation helps whether the
Octeon was the host or a coprocessor for a Xeon host. Now, apply that same
principle to text algorithms, concurrency support, compression, SSL, Hadoop's
main ops, key mechanisms of deep learning, and so forth. Performance you get
per dollar and watt gets crazy.

The only strategy I had that could deliver better was integrating FPGA's with
CPU's so workload could be split. Intel is already on top of that with Altera
acquisition. I can't wait to see accelerator logic on a Xeon. :) Meanwhile, a
combo of multicore CPU and libraries that tap into accelerators is much easier
for average developer to use. No hardware design experience necessary.

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ksec
Exactly my thoughts on FPGA, it is going to be huge on server market. Although
I read AMD is also working with Xilinx, but unfortunately due to the issue
with AMD, they will continue to use GF rather then TSMC which is what Xilinx
is using for the forseeable future.

