New processors for data centers - parse announcements of recent months

We are talking about multi-core CPU manufacturers.

/ photo PxHere PD

48 cores

At the end of 2018, Intel announced the Cascade-AP architecture. These processors will support up to 48 cores, have a multi-chip layout and 12 DDR4 DRAM channels. This approach will provide a high level of parallelism, which is useful in processing large data in the cloud. The release of products based on Cascade-AP is scheduled for 2019.

Work on 48-core processors and IBM with Samsung. They create chips on the POWER10 architecture. New devices will support the OpenCAPI 4.0 protocol and the bus NVLink 3.0. The first will provide backward compatibility with POWER9, and the second will speed up data transfer between components of the computing system up to 20 Gbps. It is also known that the POWER10 has new I / O technologies and advanced memory controllers.

Initially, the chips should have been manufactured at GlobalFoundries using the 10-nm process technology, but then the choice was made in favor of TSMC and 7-nm technology. Development plan to finish in the period from 2020 to 2022 years. By 2023, the corporation will also release POWER11 chips manufactured using a 7-nm process technology with a transistor density of 20 billion.
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According to benchmarks , 48-core Intel solutions run three times faster than their counterparts from AMD (with 32 cores). As for the POWER10, nothing is known about its performance. But it is expected that the new generation of processors will find application in the field of analytics and analysis of big data.

56 cores

Such chips have recently been announced at Intel - they will be manufactured using the 14-nm process technology. They support Optane DC based 3D Xpoint memory modules and have patches for Specter and Foreshadow vulnerabilities. New devices come with 12 memory channels and a number of built-in accelerators for solving problems in the cloud, as well as working with AI and MO systems and 5G networks.

The flagship model with 56 cores will be called Platinum 9282. The clock frequency will be 2.6 GHz, with the possibility of overclocking to 3.8 GHz. The chip has 77 MB of L3 cache, forty PCIe 3.0 lanes, and 400 W power per socket. The price of processors starts with ten thousand dollars.

The developers note that Optane DC will reduce the time to restart computing systems from a few minutes to a few seconds. Also, the new chip will allow to operate with a large number of virtual machines in the cloud environment. It is expected that the 56-core processor will reduce the cost of maintaining the work of one VM by 30%. However, experts say that the new processors, in fact, are an updated version of Xeon Scalable. The microarchitecture and the clock frequency of the chip remained the same.

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64 cores

Such a processor at the end of last year was announced at AMD. We are talking about new 64-core server chips Epyc based on 7-nm process technology. They should be introduced this year. The number of DDR4 channels will be eight at 2.2 GHz, and 256 MB of L3 cache will also be added. The chips will support 128 PCI Express 4.0 lanes instead of version 3.0, which will double the bandwidth.

But a number of residents of Hacker News believes that productivity growth is not always "on hand" to potential users. Following the acceleration of capacity, the price of processors also increases, which may reduce consumer demand.

Developed a 64-core processor and Huawei. Their Kunpeng 920 chips are server ARM processors. The manufacturer is engaged in TSMC, using the 7-nm process technology. New devices with a clock frequency of 2.6 GHz, support for interfaces PCIe 4.0 and CCIX have already been equipped with TaiShan servers. The latter are designed to work with big data and applications in the cloud.

Huawei processors have already shown a performance gain of 20% during tests with TaiShan servers. In addition, the memory bandwidth increased by 46%, compared with previous products of the corporation.

Total

In general, we can say that competition in the server chip market in 2019 will be high. Manufacturers are adding more and more cores, equipping processors with support for fresh data transfer protocols and trying to make products multi-tasking. Due to this, the data center owners have more opportunities to choose solutions that are suitable for a specific type of load and for specific tasks.

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/447750/

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