Qualcomm announces commercial shipments starting for world's first 10 nm server processor - Centriq 2400

Back in August Qualcomm released details about the Falkor core at the heart of their Centriq 2400 server SoC. Now Qualcomm has announced that shipments have started for the Centriq 2400 series, the world’s first 10 nm server processor. It was explicitly designed with low TDP per core for use in cloud computing where workloads are often highly threaded and therefore benefit greatly from high core count.

“Today’s announcement is an important achievement and the culmination of more than four years of intense design, development and ecosystem enablement effort,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. “We have designed the most advanced Arm-based server processor in the world that delivers high performance coupled with the highest energy efficiency, enabling our customers to realize significant cost savings.”

Key technical specifications:

• Built using Samsung’s 10 nm FinFET with 50 million transistors per mm²
• Up to 48 cores running at up to 2.6 GHz
• 512 KB shared L2 cache per two cores
• 60 MB of unified L3 cache per die
• TDP under 120 watts
• Support for 6-channel DDR4 RAM up to 768 GB
• Support for 32 PCIe lanes
• Support for TrustZone and hypervisors

Some high-profile launch partners were present at the event to show off applications of an ARM-based datacentre using the Centriq 2400. These included: Alibaba, LinkedIn, Canonical, HP Enterprise, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, Samsung, SUSE, and Uber among several others.

Qualcomm is positioning the top of the line Centriq 2460 48-core processor against the Xeon Platinum 8180, Intel’s 28C/56T server processor. Qualcomm claims four times better performance per dollar and around 1.5 times better performance per watt. The price advantage is also undoubtedly in Qualcomm’s favor at US$1995 vs. US$10000 for the Xeon (The Centriq 2452 has an MSRP of US$1373, and the Centriq 2434 is at US$888).