Cavium makes Thunder X2 server processor with Arm cores available

Cavium has announced its second generation of 64bit Armv8 socs for servers. The ThunderX2 line of processors consists of more than forty different models, the largest of which has 32 cores.

Cavium announces the availability of ThunderX2 chips with 16, 20, 24, 28, 30 and 32 cores. These are designs based on Vulcan, which was acquired by Cavium after the acquisition of Broadcom’s arm server chips division. The clock speeds start at 1.8GHz, while the maximum is at 2.5GHz. Cavium makes the chips at 16nm at TSMC.

Each core has 32kB of L1 cache and the same amount of cache for instructions. In addition, there is 256kB L2 cache and a block of four cores can approach 2MB L3 cache. The chips can be placed in single and dual socket systems and in the latter case there is support for 32 memory slots. The socs are cache-coherent in dual-socket systems thanks to a new generation of the Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect, which offers a throughput of 600Gbit/s. In addition, there is support for PCI-E 3.0 x16, SATA 600 and USB 3.0.

According to Next Platform, ThunderX2 chips with 54 cores are also on the way, where Cavium would have designed those cores itself. These would then compete with Qualcomm’s Centriq 2400-soc, which has 48 Arm cores, unless Qualcomm exits the server market, rumor has it. The market for Arm server chips has been seen as a growth market for years, partly because the chips are energy efficient. For the time being, Intel is dominant in that market, with its Xeons, while AMD is also trying to steal market share with its x86-based Epyc processors.