Qualcomm gives demo of 48-core Centriq 2400 chipset

The latest IDC data suggests that by 2020, almost 50 per cent of the IT spend or deployments will be cloud-based. Second, this migration to a cloud model has also created a major power shift in the supply chain, with mega datacenters sourcing server platforms directly from ODMs.

Third, most datacenter software is based on open source software projects. This enables Qualcomm, as well as other ARM ecosystem partners, to work within these open source projects to implement support for ARMv8. Lastly, the pace of manufacturing process evolution is now being driven by mobile as opposed to PCs. 

Over the past few years, as PC volumes have declined, mobile volumes have exploded past 1.4B units per year — providing a powerful incentive for foundries to drive faster to next-generation process nodes.

Back in August, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, a subsidiary of QUALCOMM Incorporated, introduced Qualcomm Centriq, a new family of ARM-based processors, to address the needs of today’s datacenter. Now the company has announced the Qualcomm Centriq 2400, the world’s first server processor built on a 10-nanometer process node.

This processor is purpose-built for performance-oriented datacenter applications. As the first in the Qualcomm Centriq product family, the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series has up to 48 cores. It features a Qualcomm Falkor CPU — company’s custom ARMv8 CPU core that’s optimized for server-class workloads.

Falkor was designed to be SBSA compliant, which ensures that software that runs on any ARMv8 server platform would also be able to run on a Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based server platform (and vice-versa). The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor is now available for sampling for select customers, and will be commercially available in the second half of 2017.