Tuesday 24 March 2020

Marvell announces 96-core ThunderX3 Arm server processor

Marvell got into the Arm server business with the 2018 acquisition of Cavium, maker of the ThunderX Arm server processor. Now the company is introducing the first major revision to the product line since the acquisition, and it's a doozy.

The ThunderX3 line tops out at a stunning 96 cores with four threads per core, for a total of 384 threads per processor. Intel and AMD have only two threads per core, and the top-end Intel Xeon maxes out at 56 cores while the AMD Epyc is at 64 cores.

Marvell also bests Ampere, the startup run by former Intel exec Renee James that's also working on an Arm-based server chip. Ampere recently announced the Altra Q80-30 processor a few weeks back sporting 80 cores entry level computer science jobs. Ampere's strategy is cores over threads.

ThunderX3 supports eight channels of DDR4-3200 with two DIMMs per channel. The IO subsystem offers 64 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0 with 16 controllers. The processor will be available in both single- and dual-socket configurations. And for floating point operations, ThunderX3 features four 128-bit SIMD (Neon) units per core.

Basic microarchitectural improvements mean the ThunderX3 will offer 25% greater IPC (instructions per clock) performance over ThunderX2. This plus the increase in the core and DDR frequencies will enable an overall gain of more than 60% in single-thread performance versus the previous generation. At the socket level, ThunderX3 provides more than 3x higher socket level integer performance and more than 5x socket level floating point performance over ThunderX2.

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