In the months since our last update, as usual, much has changed in the Arm Server ecosystem! When assessing the industry and product performance in such an emerging field, things move fast! Here are few observations and notes on the second half of 2019, and a look ahead to what to is forthcoming in 2020 for Arm Servers.
First, Marvell has continued to focus on the HPC market, and has promoted their ThunderX2 processor in talks, marketing materials, and social media posts focused on their National Laboratory projects and installations. There is also some preliminary talk about their next generation product, the ThunderX3, though details are limited at the time of this writing. In a sign of confidence, Arm directly invested a significant sum of money in the Marvell Arm Server processor as well.
Meanwhile, Ampere has had continued success with their eMag processor, including server sales through Lenovo, and a Workstation version of the platform now available as well. Similar to Marvell, Ampere has begun to discuss their next generation processor as well, stating that it will have 80 cores, and will be based on the Arm Neoverse N1 reference architecture. Again similar to Marvell, Arm has also invested directly in Ampere to keep momentum and product development strong, and more recently Oracle has invested as well.
Amazon has been competing strongly in the Arm Server market for the past year with their Graviton platform, which powers the AWS A1 Instance Type. At the re:Invent conference, Amazon announced the Graviton2 processor, which will be available soon, and increases the core count to 64 and “deliver 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory compared to the first-generation Graviton processors” according to Amazon.
The last item to make note of is the SolidRun Honeycomb platform, which is technically marketed as a Developer Workstation, but could quite easily be adapted to a small server. It offers a 16-core NXP Layerscape SoC, 4x 10gb Ethernet, SATA, PCIe, and a standard mini-ITX footprint.
As usual, if you have anything to add to the conversation, simply add your comments below, and we will continue to offer analysis and insight to all things Arm Servers!