Analyzing Falkor’s Microarchitecture: A Deep Dive into Qualcomm’s Centriq 2400 for Windows Server and Linux

Closing Thoughts: Qualcomm’s Competition

For the most part, five/six major names in this space are competing for the bulk of data center business: Intel, AMD, IBM, Cavium, and now Qualcomm. The first two are based in the omnipresent x86 architecture and are using different microarchitecture designs to account for most of the market (and Intel is most of that).

Intel’s main product is the Xeon Scalable Processor Family, launched in July, and builds on a new version of their 6^th Generation core design by increasing the L2 cache, adding support for AVX-512, moving to an internal mesh topology, and offering up to 28 cores with 768 GB/DRAM per socket (up to 1.5TB with special models). Omnipath versions are also available, and the chipset ecosystem can add support for 10 gigabit Ethernet natively, at the expense of PCIe lanes. Xeon systems can be designed with up to 8 sockets natively, depending on the processor used (and cost). Interested customers can buy these parts today from OEMs.

Intel also has the latest generation of Atom cores, found in the new Denverton products. While Intel doesn’t necessarily promote these cores for the data center, some OEMs such as HP have developed ‘Moonshot’ style of deployments that place up to 60 SoCs with up to 8 cores each in a single server (which can move up to 16 cores per SoC with Denverton).

• Intel Unveils the Xeon Scalable Processor Family: Skylake-SP in Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum
• Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000 - The Server CPU Battle of the Decade

AMD meanwhile launched their attack back on the high-end server market earlier this year with EPYC. This product uses their new high-performance Zen microarchitecture, and implements a multi-silicon die design to supports up to 32 cores and 2 TB of DRAM per socket. By implementing their new Infinity Fabric technology, AMD is promoting a wide bandwidth product that despite the multi-silicon design is engineered with strong FP units and plenty of memory and IO bandwidth. Each EPYC processor offers 128 PCIe lanes for add-in cards or storage, and can use 64 PCIe lanes to connect to a second socket, offering 64 cores/128 threads with 4TB of DRAM and 128 PCIe lanes in a 2P system. AMD is slowly rolling out EPYC to premium customers first, with wider availability during the second half of 2017.

• AMD's Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis

IBM is perhaps the odd-one out here, but due to the size is hard to ignore. IBM’s POWER architecture, and subsequent POWER8 and upcoming POWER9 designs, aim heavily on the ‘more of everything’ approach. More cores, wider cores, more threads per core, more frequency, and more memory, which translates to more cost and more energy. IBM’s partners can have custom designs of the microarchitecture implementation depending on their needs, as IBM tends to focus on the more mission critical mainframe infrastructure, but is slowly attempting to move into the traditional data center market. Large numbers such as ‘5.2 GHz’ can be enough to cause potential customers do a double take and analyze what IBM has to offer. We’ve tested IBM’s base POWER8 in the lab, and POWER9 is just around the corner.

• Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian
• Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 2: Server Applications on OpenPOWER

Cavium is the most notable public player using ARM designs in commercial systems so far (there are a number of non-public players focusing on niche scenarios, or whom have little exposure outside of China). The original design, the Cavium ThunderX, uses a custom ARMv8 core, and is designed to provide large numbers of small CPU cores with as much memory bandwidth and IO as possible. For a design that uses relatively simple 2 instruction-per-clock CPU cores, the ThunderX chips are quite large, and Cavium is positioning that product in the high performance networking market as well as environments where core counts matter than peak performance, as seen in our review which pegged per-core performance at the level of Intel’s Atom chips. The newer ThunderX2 is aiming at HPC workloads, so it will focus more on higher per-core performance. With ARM having recently announced the A75 and A55 cores under the DynamIQ banner, we’re expecting Cavium’s future designs to use a number of new design choices.

• Investigating Cavium's ThunderX: The First ARM Server SoC With Ambition

So now Qualcomm enters the fray with the Centriq 2400 family, using Falkor cores, aiming to go above Cavium and push into the traditional x86 and data center arena where others have tried and got stuck into a bit of a quagmire. Qualcomm is hoping that its expertise within the ARM ecosystem, as well as the clout of the new product, will be something that the Big Seven Plus One cannot ignore. One big hurdle is that this space is traditionally x86, so moving to ARM requires potential code changes and recompiling that will lose potential software efficiency developed over a decade. Also the Windows Server market, which Qualcomm is solving with Microsoft with a form of x86 emulation. Much like we have been hearing about Windows 10 on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 mobile chipsets, Qualcomm is going to be supporting Windows Server on Centriq 2400-series SoCs.

Wrapping thigns up, while Qualcomm has given us more information than we expected, we’d still love to hear exact numbers for L2 and L3 cache sizes, die sizes, TDPs, frequencies (we’ve been told >2.0 GHz with no turbo modes), the different SKUs coming to market, and confirmation about which foundry partner they are using.  Qualcomm will also have to be wary about ensuring sufficient support on all operating systems for customers that are interested, especially if this hardware migrates out of the specific customer set that are amenable to testing new platforms.

The Centriq 2400 family is currently being sampled in data centers, and moving into production by the end of 2017. The media sample timeframe unknown, however we're hoping we can get one in for testing before too long.