Published in PC Hardware

Qualcomm powered servers picture

by on09 October 2015


Details of a Xilinx FPGA-based card or a rack

Talking about Qualcomm's server in a single story is tricky, so we decided to tell you a bit more about the server with some product specific details in a seperate yarn.

Data center is a new opportunity for Qualcomm and the Total Amount of Market (TAM) should be more than $15 Billion by 2020. Making Intel's  Anand Chandrasekher Senior Vice President and General Manager of Datacenter Group at Qualcomm is suddenly starting to make a lot of sense.

Quallcomm targets the Hyper server market, servers that are used by Google, Amazon web services, Facebook and Microsoft in the US and by Alibaba.com, China Mobile, Baidu or Tencent in China. This market has grown from 23 percent of TAM in 2013 to 40 percent of total server market in 2014.

Server development systems pictured below are sampling now and have a Qualcomm Server-class SoC with 24 cores manufactured using FinFet architecture. This could be the Samsung 14nm FinFET or the TSMC 16nm fabricated SoC, but Qualcomm traditionally never talks about who bakes its chips. .

Commercial system based on the Qualcomm server SoC will ship with more than 24 cores manufacturered with FinFet transistors and will be using Qualcomm custom core design based on ARMv8-A instruction set. The SoC should have the server class features and performance as well as good connectivity, storage and other peripheral support.

Xilinx FGPA Based Card for Workload Acceleration

Targeting hyperscale architectures including:

  • Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
  • Cloud Platform as a Service
  • Big Data
  • Machine learning and Deep Learning
  • Network Function Virtualisation

The Demo configuration is based on Linux (distribution unknown for now) and the quest OS 1 runs the Web services, Blog services and Video services. This is what web portals like Fudzilla need but is also something that Facebook use daily.Virtualisation is offered by KVM while the Openstack takes care of Orchestration (automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware and services).

A Xilinx FPGA-based card for dynamic workload acceleration means that you should plug more than one in a system getting more cores for your processing use. Qualcomm targets parts of the markets that are covered by Nvidia Tesla and Intel Xeon Phi accelerators but it seems that the SDP platform from Qualcomm can run an operating system and web servers too.

Last modified on 09 October 2015
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