Chinese company is working on ARM server chip with 64 cores

The Chinese company Phytium Technology is working on a processor with 64 ARM cores and memory and cache controllers on a single die. The processor is intended for enterprise servers and cloud computing.

Phytium was founded in 2012 and intends to become the largest CPU and asic supplier in China, according to the presentation the company gave at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, USA. Phytium’s Mars chip is intended for applications that require a lot of computing power, memory and bandwidth. In addition, the company is still working on Earth, a less high-end processor about which little is known and which is intended for scalable applications.

Mars is made up of eight ‘panels’, with each panel having eight cores. One panel has 4MB L2 cache, which means Mars as a whole has 32MB L2. The cores are based on a ‘Xiaomi’ design, which seems to have nothing to do with the Chinese smartphone manufacturer. In any case, it concerns cores based on the ARMv8 architecture that can have 32KB L1 instruction and 32KB data cache.

Mars also has eight controllers that Phytium calls CMCs. These provide the connection with sixteen ddr3-1600 channels and 128MB L3 cache. There are also two PCI-e 3.0 interfaces. The chip has dimensions of 25×25 millimeters, runs at 2GHz and is produced at 28nm. The TDP is at 120W. According to the Chinese maker, the amount of computing power is 512gflops.

Phytium will compete with Qualcomm, Cavium and AMD, among others, who are also working on energy-efficient server chips based on ARM. In addition, Intel is working on energy-efficient server chips. However, when Mars and Earth should come out is not known.