Semiconductor
vendor Cavium announced Monday ThunderX2, its second generation of workload
optimized ARM server SoCs that targets high performance volume servers deployed
by public/private cloud and telecom communications data centers and high
performance computing applications. It is optimized for data center workloads
such as compute, security, storage, data analytics, network function
virtualization and distributed databases.
The
ThunderX2 line of processors currently includes four workload optimized processors
targeting different workloads.
The
ThunderX2_CP has been optimized for cloud compute workloads such as private and
public clouds, web serving, web caching, web search, commercial HPC workloads
such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modeling. This line
supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network Interfaces and PCIe Gen3
interfaces. It also includes accelerators for virtualization and vSwitch
offload.
The
ThunderX2_ST has been optimized for big data, cloud storage, massively parallel
processing (MPP) databases and Data warehousing workloads. This family supports
multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network interfaces, PCIe Gen3 interfaces and
SATAv3 interfaces. It also includes hardware accelerators for data protection/
integrity/security, user to user efficient data movement.
The
ThunderX2_SC has been optimized for secure web front-end, security appliances
and cloud RAN type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE
interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. Integrated hardware accelerators include
Cavium’s industry leading, 5th generation NITROX security technology with
acceleration for IPSec, RSA and SSL.
The
ThunderX2_NT has been optimized for media servers, scale-out embedded
applications and NFV type workloads. This family supports multiple
10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces. It also includes OCTEON style hardware
accelerators for packet parsing, shaping, lookup, QoS and forwarding.
“The
Cavium ThunderX2 will expand the market opportunity for ARM-based server
technologies by addressing demanding application and workload requirements for
compute, storage networking and security,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM.
“ThunderX2 demonstrates Cavium’s ability to deliver a combination of innovation
and engineering execution and the new product family increases the momentum for
server deployments powered by ARM processors in large scale data centers and
end user environments.”
Cavium’s
ThunderX2 SoC line is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem ranging
from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial operating
systems, development environments and applications.
Cavium
has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and
delivered numerous reference platforms to an array of community and corporate
partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its position in the open source software
community driving upstream kernel enablement for ThunderX, actively
contributing to Linaro’s enterprise and networking groups, investing in Linux
Foundation projects such as Xen and OPNFV and sponsoring the FreeBSD
Foundation’s ARMv8 server implementation.
ThunderX2
will deliver two to three times the performance across a range of standard
benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX, while boosting the market
reach of the ThunderX line of processors by targeting applications that require
high single thread performance such as web search, graph analytics, a variety
of enterprise applications such as massively parallel processing (MPP)
databases, data warehousing and enterprise HPC applications such as
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modelling. ThunderX2 will
deliver comparable performance at a better total cost of ownership compared to
the next generation of traditional server processors.(Know More)
