Published in PC Hardware

Macom samples its third generation 16-nanometer FinFET Server-on-a-Chip

by on16 March 2017


Most powerful ARM


MACOM Connectivity Solutions announced the sampling of its third generation 16-nanometer FinFET Server-on-a-Chip(SoC), X-Gene 3.

Launched in November 2016, the X-Gene 3 SoC is the industry’s first ARMv8-A compatible processor that matches comparable x86 processors in CPU throughput, per-thread performance and power efficiency, while offering advantages in memory bandwidth and total cost of ownership.

The company claims that its third-generation design features microarchitecture improvements make the chip the most powerful ARM CPU available today.

It features 32 ARMv8-A 64-bit cores operating at speeds up to 3.0 GHz, eight DDR4-2667 memory channels with ECC and RAS supporting up to 16 DIMMs and addressing up to 1TB of memory and 42 PCIe Gen 3 lanes with eight controllers.

The processor is expected to have a performance that is up to six times that of the currently shipping X-Gene family of products.

MACOM has developed reference platforms for X-Gene 3 that support the full memory capacity, as well as several PCIe and SATA ports, other standard I/O and an AST2500 board-management controller (BMC) for platform management.

The reference platform ships with the AMI AptioV UEFI BIOS and the industry standard CentOS server operating system.
Kumar Sankaran, associate vice president of software and platform engineering for MACOM’s newly acquired AppliedMicro compute business said that the X-Gene 3 performance and power measurements are exceeding expectations.

Linley Group principal analyst Linley Gwennap said that with two products in production and a third on the way, X-Gene has already built a strong ecosystem that competitors have yet to match.

“The X-Gene 3 can handle a broad range of cloud workloads, including scale-up and scale-out applications. The processor excels on big data, particularly in-memory databases, because of its high memory bandwidth. With X-Gene 3, ARM is ready for the cloud,” he said.

Parag Jain, associate vice president of processor products for the compute business unit of MACOM said that the company was seeing unprecedented demand for the X-Gene 3 evaluation platforms.

Last modified on 16 March 2017
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