Continuing our quarterly ARM Server update series, it is now Summer 2018 so it is time to review the ARM Server news and ecosystem updates from the past few months! This blog series only covers the ARM Server highlights, but for more in-depth ARM Server news be sure to check out the Works on Arm Newsletter, delivered every Friday by Ed Vielmetti!
Looking at our recent blog posts, the most important headline seems to be the rumored exit from the business by Qualcomm. Although, at the moment, this has not been confirmed, if true it would be a major setback for ARM Servers in the datacenter. The Qualcomm Centriq had been shown to be very effective by CloudFlare for their distributed caching workload, and had been shown by Microsoft to be running a portion of the Azure workload as well.
However, just as Qualcomm is rumored to be exiting, Cavium has released the new ThunderX2 to general availability, and several new designs have now been shown and are listed for sale. The ThunderX2 processor is a 32-core design that can directly compete with Xeons, and provides all of the platform features that a hyperscaler would expect.
Finally, in software news, Ubuntu has released it’s latest 18.04 Bionic Beaver release, which is an LTS version, thus offering 5 years of support. As in the past, there is an ARM64 version of Ubuntu, which should technically work on any UEFI standard ARM Server. Examples include Ampere X-Gene servers, Cavium ThunderX servers, Qualcomm, Huawei, HP Moonshot, and AMD Seattle servers.
As always, make sure to check back for more ARM Server and Datacenter industry news, or follow us on Twitter for daily updates on all things ARM, IoT, single board computers, edge computing, and more!