Category: Servers

Cavium launches the world's fastest ARM Processor in their family of workload optimized ThunderX 64bit ARMv8 Server Processors (including ThunderX_CP for Cloud, ThunderX_ST for Storage, ThunderX_SC for Security and ThunderX_NT for Networking), for a range of applications in the cloud and data center. With 48 cores running at 2.5GHz each, ThunderX is the world’s highest performing low-power 64-bit ARMv8 SoC family of workload optimized processors with a range of SKUs and form factors for high performance volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking specific workloads. Analysts predict that the global data center infrastructure market, including servers, storage, networking, security and virtualization, will reach $128 billion in 2014. Cavium is hereby taking their share of that market by releasing their extremely high performance custom design ARM Server processor.

This product family is based on highly efficient full custom processor cores designed by Cavium in 28nm process technology under architectural license from ARM. It is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture as well as ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard while bringing to market dramatic enhancements that include:

-The first ARM based SoC that scales up to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K of I-Cache and 32K of D-Cache along with 16MB of L2 cache.
- The first ARM based SOC to be fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI™)
- Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth
- Four DDR3/4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting 2400 MHz memories with 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration
- Hundreds of integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications.
- Standard based low latency Ethernet fabric interconnecting thousands of ThunderX™ nodes in 2D and 3D configurations and enabling fabric monitoring and SLA enforcements with awareness and policy enforcement for virtualized networks.
- Virtualization everywhere with Cavium virtSOC™ technology – Full system virtualization for low latency from virtual machine to I/O.
- Best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for the target applications

Read more: press release

Related articles

• Cavium announces 48-core ARMv8 server processor (techreport.com)
• Cavium packs 48 cores into ThunderX ARM chips (pcworld.com)
• Cavium Thunder X ups the ARM core count to 48 on a single chip (semiaccurate.com)
• Welcoming Cavium as latest Xen Project Advisory Board member (xen.org)
• Cavium ThunderX: 2.5 GHz, 48 Core ARMv8 SoC (phoronix.com)
• Cavium ThunderX ARM Chip Rumbles Into Hyperscale (enterprisetech.com)
• 48 Core ARM-64 processors from Cavium to challenge Xeons? (eetimes.com)
• 64-bit Cortex Platform To Take On x86 Servers In The Cloud (electronicdesign.com)
• Cavium sets sights on Intel with 48-core SoC (go.theregister.com)
• Cavium Announces Mainstream ARM Server Chips To Challenge Xeon (techweekeurope.co.uk)