Cavium is now selling 48-core ARM V8 based Thunder X CPUs

Two makes a market but not a crowd yet

Dec 2, 2014 by

Cavium logoCavium is now officially selling their ARM V8 based Thunder X family of CPUs. By SemiAccurate’s count this makes them the second player with products on the market after Applied Micro.

We covered the Cavium Thunder X line of parts earlier, short story is there are four variants for four major markets. That would be the X_ST for storage, X_CP for compute, X_SC for security, and X_NT for data plane. They come in 24-48 core versions in one or two sockets with four DDR3/4 channels per socket, and all the previously mentioned bells and whistles. Basically compute heavy workloads get more cores and less I/O, throughput workloads are the opposite.

Since Applied Micro has parts for sale too, there are now two players on the market. There would be three if the soap opera that is AMD was anything more than infinite but hollow press releases, count that one at your own peril. A year ago SemiAccurate was asking if the microserver market was real. With 2.somethingsmall players on the market in the waning days of 2014, things are playing out exactly like we said last January. With Cavium now officially selling ARM V8 based server chips, things are definitely real.S|A

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy Google+ profileMy LinkedIn profile

Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate