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.
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.
