It has been far too long since our last blog post, and there have been many changes in the ARM Server ecosystem (as usual!) since our last update. Here we will recap some of the major highlights and product announcements of the past several months in 2017.
First and foremost, ARM Servers are gaining traction with 2 major product releases:
- The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 was formally released by Qualcomm, and samples have made their way out to industry partners and reviewers. The Centriq is a 48-core chip, although other variants may be possible as well.
- HPE has shown off their Apollo 70 HPC server at the recent Supercomputing ’17 (SC17) conference. This server is based on the Cavium ThunderX2 processor, and is being marketed towards the HPC use case, where ARM Servers are making rapid progress.
Next, there has been major Operating System news as well, with Red Hat formally releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4 for ARM. This allows customers of Red Hat to have a fully supported OS like they are already accustomed to with their x86 offering.
In the SBC world, Fedora 27 was recently released with additional and expanded support for ARM-powered boards. The Dragonboard 410c and HiKey from 96Boards are two popular boards now officially supported, along with the RaspberryPi 3.
And finally, ARM Servers have been gaining quite a bit of media attention due to industry mergers and acquisitions (well, proposals). Marvell has made a bid to acquire Cavium, and Broadcom has pursued Qualcomm, although that deal appears to be opposed by Qualcomm at the moment.
As always, we will continue to watch the industry closely, so check back for updates, hopefully in a more timely fashion next time. 🙂