Cavium Introduces 64bit ARMv8 Soc with 48 Cores for Servers

The company Cavium has designed an ARMv8 soc optimized for server applications. The ThunderX soc can contain up to 48 cores with a clock speed of up to 2.5GHz. The soc supports numerous interfaces.

The ThunderX’s soc design is based on a 28nm process with the chip architecture licensed from ARM. According to the manufacturer, the soc can contain up to 48 ARM64 cores and a maximum clock speed of 2.5GHz is specified. Cavium does not yet want to reveal figures about the consumption, for example the tdp of the ThunderX. ARM server chips are touted precisely for being more energy efficient than x86 processors.

The SOC natively supports SATA-600, PCI-E v3, up to 100Gbit Ethernet interfaces and up to four DDR3 or DDR4 memory sticks. The Ethernet interface is also compatible with 40Gbit/s and 10Gbit/s Ethernet. In a test system with two ThunderX sockets, up to 1TB of RAM would be addressable. Multiple ThunderX sockets can share the available cache memory.

Cavium wants to release different versions of its ThunderX soc. For example, there must be a version for extra secure servers, network servers, storage systems and a soc for regular server tasks. The manufacturer will activate or deactivate certain parts of the soc. Cavium is not yet making any announcements about prices, but the first samples that can be tested by companies will appear in the fourth quarter.