One of the important thing drivers within the Arm server area over the previous few years has been the cohesion of the totally different product groups making an attempt to construct the following processor to assault the dominance of x86 within the enterprise market. Various firms and merchandise have come and gone (Qualcomm’s Centriq) or been acquired (Annapurna by Amazon, Applied Micro by Ampere), with various levels of success, a few of which is linked to the important thing personnel in every crew. One of our readers has lately highlighted us to a latest motion on this area: Gopal Hegde, the VP/GM of the ThunderX Processor Business Unit at Marvell, has now left the corporate.
ThunderX was initially underneath the banner of Cavium, and the corporate launched two generations of merchandise constructed on Arm: ThunderX, and ThunderX2. We reviewed each methods, with ThunderX in 2016 and ThunderX2 in 2018, the latter being famous as a possible competitor in outlined workloads in addition to cloud and internet hosting suppliers, given the appropriate worth. We’ve seen ThunderX2 have some success in container deployments, in addition to HPC. However, throughout the deployment of ThunderX2, Cavium was acquired by Marvell for $5.5 billion USD, with the corporate seeking to bolster its CPU, networking, and safety belongings. That acquisition was accomplished in July 2018.
It was famous that earlier than the acquisition, Cavium was eager to focus on it had a daily roadmap deliberate for its ThunderX line of processors and servers. ThunderX3 was understood to be an aggressive design fitted to a variety of markets. However, after the acquisition, restricted data was supplied past what was mentioned by Cavium. It was with some private frustration that making an attempt to debate something about ThunderX3 on the Marvell sales space at Supercomputing 2019 was met with a wall of silence. It is usually very odd for an organization to remain silent for therefore lengthy, particularly on a product the place particulars had been anticipated a couple of months prior, primarily based on earlier launch cycles. Conversing with friends on the time, we got here to the identical realization that ThunderX3 was, maybe, later than anticipated.
However, a lot to our shock, Marvell reached out to us in March this yr to debate the preliminary steps of ThunderX3. While it wasn’t a deep dive into the structure, we have been actually very glad to be advised the highlights – a 3rd era customized microarchitecture on prime of Arm v8.3+, utilizing 4 threads per core, scaling as much as 96 cores or 384 threads per chip. This was mixed with 8x DDR4-3200 reminiscence controllers, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and 4 128-bit SIMD models per core. This is all to be constructed on TSMC 7nm. In our briefing, we have been advised {that a} essential aspect to the design of the chip is that it stays monolithic, and that the chip is to focus on a big variety of cloud-based workloads and HPC workloads with its differentiation (akin to SMT4) to permit for increased utilization of the underlying {hardware}. We predict extra details about ThunderX3 at Hot Chips in August, in addition to an replace on the roadmap.
Heading up Cavium and Marvell’s efforts for the ThunderX challenge was Gopal Hegde. Gopal cites his expertise in serving to construct the engineering groups throughout a number of websites worldwide, and as a core and platform engineer, helped outline the specs, the silicon, the model, and the roadmap as a part of a wider crew. This was a place held by Gopal since 2014, and earlier than that he was COO of Calxeda, in keeping with his LinkedIn.
Gopal Hegde, Image from LinkedIn
It is price noting that Dr. Shubu Mukherjee, Lead Architect for ThunderX and ThunderX2, additionally left the corporate in December 2019, to work at SiFive. Gopal Hegde has since transitioned to SVP of Engineering and Operations at SiMa.ai, a startup seeking to present power environment friendly…
