5nm server ARM processor straight from India. What is this chip and what can it do?
India knows how to surprise. A few years ago, she designed and successfully launched a satellite to Mars from scratch. Moreover, the entire project, which was named Mangalyaan, cost only $70 million, in contrast to the hundreds of millions of US dollars that are allocated for similar programs in other countries.
Now a new surprise – the first Indian AUM processor with 96 cores, created using 5nm technology with ARM architecture, is presented. This is not a custom chip, its purpose is to work in high-performance systems. The developers have already announced that the processor will go on sale in late 2023 or early 2024. Details about the processor – under the cut.
What kind of chip is this and who will produce it?
The Indians in the country do not yet have a deployed infrastructure for the production of semiconductor chips. Therefore, the developers chose the standard way for many companies – ordering the production of chips from a foreign vendor. In this case, the Taiwanese company TSMC.
The chip itself is very modern, because even Intel’s Xeon is manufactured using a 10-nm process technology. In addition, the processor is dual-cluster. Each cluster has 48 cores, which gives 96 cores. By the way, the code name is Zeus. The developers do not explain the choice of the name. In standard mode, the cores can operate at up to 3 GHz. If necessary, you can increase the performance up to 3. GHz.
As for the TDP of the new processor, it is from 280 to 320 W, depending on the load. In addition, the developers announced the presence of 86 MB of L2 cache and 96 MB of system cache. What’s more, the processor gets 96GB of HBM3 memory, it is DDR5 compatible.
And that’s not all, the developers have added 128 PCI-E 5.0 lines – also the most modern standard. In this, Indian developers are also keeping pace with the times – after all, not all Intel and AMD server chips have such a solution.
There is another interesting possibility – AUM processors can work in pairs, for this two-socket motherboards are provided. One chip delivers up to 4.6 Tflops. Well, there is support for modern encryption algorithms and Secure Boot.
Information about the processor was provided to the technology media by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of India, so this is first-hand data.
The third is not superfluous
Until now, server modern processors have been produced only by companies from the USA and China. In addition, engineers from Loongson created their own LoongArch architecture. The company has developed its own instruction format, their encoding, addressing modes, etc. LoongArch contains about 2000 proprietary instructions. According to the developers, they have removed obsolete instructions to ensure lower power consumption and more efficient operation. In addition to the core instruction set, the company has added Binary Transform Extension (LBT) instructions, Vector Processing Extension (LSX) instructions, Extended Vector Processing Extension (LASX) instructions, and Virtualization Extension (LVZ) instructions, PC Watch reports.
You can also mention the company Ampere Computing, which also develops server chips on the ARM architecture. New chips are optimized to work in modern data centers, including clouds and hyperscalers. Processors need to be energy efficient and powerful at the same time. Since the design of the cores is their own, the company got the opportunity to finer optimize the architecture, which allows it to achieve its goals. It is worth noting that in chips with a standard Neoverse N1, she managed to increase the number of cores by 60% with the same level of heat dissipation. The performance of the new processors should be even higher.
Also recently it became known that Microsoft is developing its own processor. The company plans to use these chips in the production of the Surface line, and possibly in other devices. Now the corporation uses chips from Intel, but if everything goes as Microsoft plans, the situation may change. True, in the case of the Redmond company, we are talking about working on a consumer processor, not a server one.
And, of course, we should not forget about the traditional suppliers of server chips, AMD and Intel corporations.
If the Indian chip turned out to be really successful, and the characteristics correspond to the declared ones, then the competition in the market of server chips will intensify. Which is likely to lead to some price reduction. In any case, there will be more productive processors.
Why are more companies choosing ARM architecture?
It’s simple – the architecture has many advantages, including critical ones for modern hardware and applications:
- Ability to support heterogeneous and dynamically changing workloads. All thanks to the scalability that the chips provide, as well as their cost-effectiveness, as mentioned above.
- Solutions based on ARM chips can be adapted to perform a wide variety of tasks, including very highly specialized ones.
- In addition, the equipment is smaller than usual, so that the area is less.
The last point is especially important, since another trend has now emerged – the deployment of so-called small data centers by telecom operators and cloud service providers, which contribute to the active penetration of ARM processors into the market. In addition, the chips are in demand by hyperscalers and various edge computing vendors.
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