Aug 8, 2014

Cavium ThunderX 48 Core 2.5Ghz ARM SOC running Linux: Mocking x86

Cavium, a San Jose based company known for its MIPS chips is now making a thunderous entry into the ARM world with its 48 core ThunderX. As versatile as Linux it isn’t without a doubt its the primary operating system of choice.

The chips are designed for server use, secure and high bandwidth low latency networking for data centres. This is the least to say why we can't we see nor buy any ARM based “PC’s”. That’s probably because and until global repository maintainer’s start porting to ARM and the new 64 bit paradigm -- aarch64. Aarch64 has support coming in by the day and also that Linaro is defining future standards for Linux and the unprecedented support that it will get from hardware makers and it’s partners.

Its clear for now. What has taken the x86 universe decades to achieve is now being weakened by the mocking knell of ARM, reverberating and quaking its monopolized base, by Intel. That isn’t the least to negate against Intel. Intel like AMD has a ginormous support for its hardware on Linux. Infact most open source projects are being funded and developed by Intel, RedHat and Linaro. All this for the convenience of the consumer. X86 isn’t going anywhere but it will slowly but surely transmorph into something that can compete and stay one step ahead of ARM.

The Raspberry Pi has taken the world by storm. There are projects springing up that use more powerful chip’s made by other different manufacturers. It won't be long before entire repositories get ported or auto ported to ARM. That day is not far away but has already passed.



The video above shows a 48 core ARMv8 solution running SUSE, Ubuntu and RedHat versions of Linux. What is amazing is that various subsystems that are usually placed on the motherboard are now inside the SoC, like LAN, PCI-Express etc.

No comments:

Post a Comment