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ARMpire stormtroopers

Four to five years ago, information technology was common to see CEOs and companies confidently predicting ARM would have a significant slice of the server market in the not-too-distant future. This, needless to say, has not come up to pass. Qualcomm recently launched its upcoming Falkor CPUs, but those parts oasis't had time still to demonstrate any kind of competitive standing. Even if they play well, Qualcomm won't striking the 15 percentage of the market AMD's then-CEO, Rory Read, used to confidently predict Sunnyvale could hit with a combination of Cortex-A55 and a custom K12 CPU (now shelved, to the best of our knowledge). That'southward conspicuously not going to happen, but Cray is pushing ARM into some other high-end market place — supercomputing.

The venerable supercomputer manufacturer announced it's partnering with Cavium to build supercomputers featuring the ThunderX2 CPU. The ThunderX2 is fully ARMv8 compatible (that's ARM'southward 64-bit ISA), only information technology's based on a custom version of the architecture, not a licensed core design similar the Cortex-A72 or Cortex-A73. Cavium hasn't said a nifty deal about its custom architecture, simply nosotros know the chip has upward to 54 CPU cores at 3GHz, six DDR4 memory controllers, its ain scalable textile, and is built on a 14nm FinFET process (this could imply the flake is built at GF rather than TSMC). It'south a major win for Cavium, and a huge boost for ARM's efforts to expand beyond mobile computing.

ThunderX2-Feature

"With the integration of Arm processors into our flagship Cray XC50 systems, we will offer our customers the earth's most flexible supercomputers," said Fred Kohout, Cray's senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. "Adding ARM processors complements our system's ability to back up a variety of host processors, and gives customers a unique, leadership-class supercomputer for compute, simulation, big data analytics, and deep learning."

Cray is working on an ARM-based supercomputer in the Britain, codenamed Isembard. In add-on to its own hardware blueprint expertise, Cray has been working to optimize its own compiler stacks and customize its software for execution on the ThunderX2. Liquid-and-air cooled versions of the arrangement will be available, and Cray customers will have the option to deploy ARM compute blades with Xeon products, Xeon Phi hardware, and Nvidia Tesla GPUs also. Availability is expected in Q2 2018.