Marvell at the Hot Chips 32 event revealed details about the third generation of ARM-based Thunder-X processors, which we talked about earlier .
ARM processors have become extremely popular in the mobile field over the past few years, but now there is another trend - the penetration of chips with this architecture into server development. As it turned out, processors with ARM architecture perform very well. But let's find out what Marvell has to offer.
The company said that 96 cores are relevant only for a dual-crystal layout. One crystal can include up to 60 cores. This is similar to the approach from IBM with their IBM POWER10. Thanks to SMT4, the processor from Marvell can provide 240 or 384 threads depending on the version. This allows cloud providers to host a large number of VMs within a single socket.
SMT4 support is implemented in hardware. Therefore, each ThunderX3 thread for the OS looks like a separate processor with ARM architecture. In this case, the crystal area is increased by only 5%.
As for the previous generation of processors, Marvell claims a 30% superiority over the Thunder X2. The third generation ThunderX, according to the developer's calculations, is 2-3 times more productive than the second. This increase is largely due to work based on the ARM v8.3 instruction and partial support for ARM v8.4 / 8.5.
Unlike Intel, which chose ring buses for core communication, Marvell used a mesh network. In the current layout, the outer ring contains the cache (80MB L3 per chip), power management units, and memory, PCI Express, and interprocessor bus (in this case, CCPI) controllers.
The developers also talked about the sharing of kernel resources. As it turned out, it is dynamic, carried out at four points, including sampling, execution, planning and "retirement". The company has optimized multithreading to enable linear scaling of new processors. The growth rate ranges from x1.28 to 2.21.
Finally, the company also revealed the details of the I / O subsystem. Power control received 8 channels and support for DDR4-3200. There are 16 separate controllers responsible for PCI Express support, which support the fourth version of the standard. This provides a high level of performance when connected to 16 NVMe drives.
In the future, Marvell will talk about power management - until these details have been revealed. But it is known that the manufacturer of the processor is TSMC, the technical process is 7 nm. The 60-core version will go on sale later this year. And next time the company will supply dual-crystal processors. In addition, the development of the ThunderX4 processor has already begun.