The announcement yesterday of the cancelation of Marvel’s ThunderX3 Arm Server processor was a reminder that we were overdue for an Arm Server update! So, continuing on in our regular series, here is the latest news in the Arm Server ecosystem.
As mentioned, unfortunately it appears at this time that Marvell has canceled the ThunderX3 Arm Server processor that was shown earlier this year, and would have been the successor to the ThunderX and ThunderX2 parts released previously. The current rumors indicate that perhaps some specialized version of the SoC may survive and be used for an exclusive contract with a hyperscaler, but that means “regular” customers will not be able to acquire the part. And with no general purpose, general availability part, the ThunderX3 will effectively be unavailable.
That leaves AWS providing the Graviton processor in the EC2 cloud server option, or Ampere with their current generation eMag Arm Server, and forthcoming Ampere Altra SoC as the only server-class Arm processors left (for now). The Ampere Altra is brand new, and available from our friends at Packet in an Early Access Program, but no specific General Availability date has been mentioned quite yet. This processor offers 80-cores or 128-cores, and is based on Arm Neoverse N1 cores.
There is another processor on the horizon though from Nuvia, a startup formed late last year who is designing an Arm-based server class SoC. Nuvia has said it will take several years to bring their processor to market, which is a typical timeframe for an all-new custom processor design. So in the meantime, only Amazon and Ampere are left in the market.
The NXP desktop-class LS2160 as found in the SolidRun Honeycomb could also be considered for some workloads, but it is a 16-core part based on A72 cores.
There is one other Arm Server that exists, but unfortunately it’s not able to be acquired outside of China: the Huawei TaiShan 2280 based on the HiSilicon Kunpeng 920. This is a datacenter part that is likely used by the large cloud providers in China, but seems difficult (or impossible) to obtain otherwise. It is a dual processor server, with 64-cores in each processor, thus totaling 128 cores per server.
As usual, the Arm Server ecosystem moves quickly, and we look forward to seeing what’s new and exciting in our next update!
