Qualcomm is taking aim at Intel’s dominance in high-end computing with the unveiling of the ‘world’s first’ 10-nanometer (nm) server microprocessor.
The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series, the first in the Centriq product family that Qualcomm has been working on for four years, has up to 48 ARMv8-compliant cores targeting compute-intensive data centre applications that also require power efficiency, and is built on the 10nm FinFET manufacturing process.
This sees the company taking aim at Intel’s lucrative server business which isn’t expected to deliver any 10nm chips until the second half of 2017 at the earliest, with server processors not likely to arrive until 2018.
“The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series processors will drive high performance, power-efficient ARM-based servers from concept to reality,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies.
“Qualcomm requires the leading edge of integrated circuit technology to deliver high performance at low power for the newest premium smartphones.
“We are first in 10nm integrated-circuit technology for mobile and, leveraging our expertise in ARM processors and system-on-chip design, we are the first with our Qualcomm Centriq family of server processors to bring the leading edge to the data centre. ”
At a launch event, Qualcomm demonstrated Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on a Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor.
The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor series is now sampling to key prospective customers and is expected to be commercially available in the second half of 2017.
