SAN JOSE, Calif. – Cavium described significant upgrades planned for its next-generation ARM server SoC. Details of the ThunderX2, which won’t be in volume production until late next year, come at a time when the first-generation chip is gaining traction but has not yet found high volume markets.
It’s been a slow slog bringing ARM-based servers to a market heavily dominated by the Intel x86 and its deep pool of legacy software. To date, Cavium has had as much or more market traction than any of the surviving players, but it is so far only shipping thousands of chips per quarter.
“The primary reason announcing now is our first products are in the market so the market is anxious about what’s next,” said Rishi Chugh, marketing director for Cavium’s data center group.
Late last year, rival Applied Micro announced its 32-core X-Gene 3 will ship by the end of this year. Its third generation part, made in a 16nm process, likewise comes without big sales for its first two versions.
Cavium is “engaged with 40+ customers…and some of them have started ramping” the 24-48 core ThunderX, said M. Raghib Hussain, chief technology officer and a co-founder of Cavium.
“It took longer than expected. Its not just having software and ODM platforms available, but working in production-ready BIOS, OSes, hypervisors, tool chains, having Java and PHP support available and optimized apps — all this took longer than expected,” Hussain said.
Cavium currently claims the high-end of the ARM server market with the most cores and support for dual-socket systems, competing with Intel’s Xeon line. Some competitors got distracted by the concept of a microserver market that didn’t pan out for 32-bit and low-end parts.
Next page: Of tire kickers and looming rivals
Leave a Reply
You must Register or Login to post a comment.