NEOVERSE
Arm has revealed two next-generation Neoverse server CPU designs, saying that the new V1 core for maximum performance and N2 core for scale-out performance will deliver significantly higher performance than processors made by Intel or AMD.
The British chip designer made the claims as part of a major update for its Neoverse server CPU roadmap Tuesday, a little more than a week after Nvidia announced that it plans to acquire Arm for $40 billion from its current owner in Japan, SoftBank Group.
Arm updates Neoverse server processors with considerable performance claims Arm boasts the new Neoverse processor designs will deliver 50% better performance for the same power as the previous.
[Related: IBM: Power10 CPU’s ‘Memory Inception’ Is Industry’s ‘Holy Grail’]
- The Neoverse N2 is an obvious design that focuses on Arm’s PPA metrics, and the company sees customers designing products that are primarily focused on “scale-out” workloads that requite a lot of.
- Here are the NEOVERSE System Requirements (Minimum). CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 or better; CPU SPEED: Info; RAM: 4 GB; OS: Windows 7/8/8.1 (32 or 64 bit) VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4850 - 512 MB of VRAM.
- Neoverse is a beautiful, fantastic game consisting of adventures with thrilling challenges. It is a strategic, action, rogue-lite, deck building game that will test the player’s skill. Start an adventure with unique heroes to save the world along various timelines.
Arm’s new Neoverse disclosures were made as the company claimed significant progress in the data center market, with four of the world’s top seven hyperscalers adopting Arm-based processors for deployments and with Arm-based Fujitsu processors powering Fugaku, the newly minted fastest supercomputer in the world. Arm’s V1 design has already been provided to silicon partners, and the N2 design is already sampling with some partners, though full delivery won’t happen until next year.
“The emergence of Arm in the data center is being powered by many factors: customization, efficiency, ecosystem diversity, but all of that builds on top of performance,” Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s infrastructure business, said in a pre-briefing with journalists and analysts. “If Neoverse wasn’t delivering a significant measurable value proposition you would not see the market adoption and momentum that we are achieving.”
Bergey said the new V1 CPU core — previously code-named Zeus and part of the Neoverse’s new V-series for high single-threaded and machine learning performance — provides a more than 50-percent performance improvement over Arm’s N1 core. The N1 core is currently used to power Amazon Web Services’ Graviton2 processors and Ampere’s upcoming 128-core Altra Max processors, both of which have claimed significant gains over Intel’s and AMD’s server processors.
V1, which is designed for 7- and 5-nanometer process technologies, will be Arm’s first design core to support Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), with two vector of 256 bit width, which will make it well-suited for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads, according to Bergey. The CPU will also support bfloat16, PCIe 5.0 connectivity, DDR5, HBM2e and CCIX 1.0 for bidirectional coherent communications between chips across sockets and in-package chiplets.
“At the implementation level, our silicon partners have full control over SVE voltage and frequency transitions, so there doesn’t have to be a frequency drop,” Bergey said. “Fujitsu’s A64FX CPU is a great example of this: They can run full frequency all day long while executing SVE code.”
With the new N2 CPU core — previously code-named Perseus and part of the N-series for scale-out and 5G applications — the design will provide more than a 50-percent performance improvement over N1 in addition to supporting SVE and bfloat16. N2 will be designed for 5nm process technologies, and, like V1, it will support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, but it will go even further by supporting HBM3 for high-bandwidth memory as well as both CCIX 2.0 and CXL 2.0 for fabrics.
With a focus on scale-out deployments, N2 can support anywhere from 192 cores at 350 watts of thermal design power to eight cores at 20 watts, which means the CPU core is well suited for a wide range of applications, from cloud data centers to low-power edge gateways and routers.
Neoverse E1
“[CXL] could involve sharing a large pool of memory across a set of connected nodes, or it could mean just attaching a large amount of emerging memory to a single node,” Bergey said. “CXL is proving to be the preferred way to attach accelerators, where accelerators and the host can coherently access each other‘s memory. The most obvious use cases here are [machine learning] training and inference, but we expect new use cases to emerge by the time this hits the market.”
The biggest differences between the two new core designs is that V1 is designed to deliver the highest possible level of single-threaded performance, meaning more power consumption, while N2 is designed to deliver higher core counts and an optimized performance-power ratio for scale-out deployments.
“If your application is very CPU and bandwidth demanding, then V1 will give you the best performance per thread. But if your application is more scale out and needing more cores, then N2 may be a better choice as you will find more instances with higher core counts,” Bergey said. “So that‘s the beauty of Arm Neoverse, whether you need best per-thread performance or best scale-out performance, we think we’ve got you covered.”
With performance data from internal estimates, Bergey said an Arm N1 processor with 128 cores already provides higher performance per socket and higher performance per thread over AMD’s 64-core EPYC 7742 processor and Intel’s Xeon 8268 processor. But with a 96-core V1 processor and a 128-core N2 processor, those gains over the AMD and Intel processors increase significantly, he added.
“We know the alternative architecture isn’t standing still, but we’re very confident that Neoverse N2 will continue to represent the ultimate in per socket performance and Neoverse V1 will offer the ultimate per thread performance into the future,” he said.
Along with Arm’s advances in CPU designs, Bergey said the company has also built a solid foundation of software support in the data center, citing support from Red Hat, VMware, SUSE, Oracle Linux, KVM, Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, MongoDB, Apache and other plays in the ecosystem.
“Arm‘s decade-long efforts to build an ecosystem of foundational infrastructure software is finally being seen,” he said. “Arm is now a first-class citizen with the largest continuous integration, continuous deployment of platforms. Even though we’ve been very focused on cloud-native, we continue to build an impressive list of commercial [independent software vendor] applications and have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline.”
Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Nor-Tech, a Burnsville, Minn.-based high-performance computing system integrator, told CRN that some of his university customers have previously expressed interest in Arm-based processors when the company shared a previous update because of Arm’s reputation for enabling chips with high energy efficiency.
But for a system integrator like Nor-Tech to consider selling and supporting Arm-based processors, there needs to be a greater ecosystem around the products, including server vendors like Supermicro and Gigabyte, according to Daninger.
“First of all, we‘d have to have a market interest in it and inquiries on it. And then you’ve got to have the infrastructure of some server motherboard manufacturer and CPU manufacturers to support it,” he said. “And you’re going to have to have some level of confidence that they’re going to be here in two years — that kind of thing. So all those things have to fall into place.”
Accelerating the next generation cloud-to-edge infrastructure
News highlights
- Adoption of Arm Neoverse solutions are accelerating across key segments including hyperscale/cloud computing, HPC, 5G, and the edge
- Arm is further enabling the infrastructure transformation with the introduction of Neoverse V1 and N2 platforms, delivering 50% and 40% more performance, respectively, over Neoverse N1
- Arm continues to invest in the software ecosystem to enable a frictionless developer experience and software that ‘just works’
Ten years ago, Arm set its sights on deploying its compute-efficient technology in the data center with a vision towards a changing landscape that would require a new approach to infrastructure compute.
That decade-long effort to lay the groundwork for a more efficient infrastructure was realized when we announced Arm Neoverse, a new compute platform that would deliver 30% year-over-year performance improvements through 2021. The unveiling of our first two platforms, Neoverse N1 and E1, was significant and important. Not only because Neoverse N1 shattered our performance target by nearly 2x to deliver 60% more performance when compared to Arm’s Cortex-A72 CPU, but because we were beginning to see real demand for more choice and flexibility in this rapidly evolving space.
Now more than ever, Arm is focused on partnering with our ecosystem to understand the problems they are trying to solve, and delivering the high-performance, secure platforms needed to enable the infrastructure of tomorrow.
The velocity of Arm Neoverse
Neoverse N1 solutions are the first steps towards a new infrastructure, and are now powering innovations from supercomputers to increasing deployments in the world’s largest data centers, and all the way to the edge.
To accelerate this infrastructure transformation and enable new levels of innovation, we are announcing the next phase for Neoverse with the addition of two new platforms on our product roadmap. For the first time today, we are introducing the Arm Neoverse V1 platform, and the Neoverse N2, our second-generation N-series platform.
Ultimate performance: Neoverse V1 platform introduces SVE
The introduction of Neoverse V1 platform is the first in the V-series and delivers a single-threaded performance uplift of more than 50% over N1, our fastest for applications more reliant on CPU performance and bandwidth. Importantly, Neoverse V1 supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), bringing massive potential for markets such as high-performance cloud, HPC, and machine learning.
SVE enables execution of SIMD integer, bfloat16, or floating-point instructions on wider vector units using a software programming model that’s agnostic to the width of the unit. With SVE, we are ensuring portability and longevity of the software code, along with efficient execution.
Neoverse Costumes
Doubling down: Neoverse N2 platform delivers scalable performance
In an expanding market, we hear from our partners often that scalability is key. Neoverse N2 enables this by providing an even higher-performing computing solution to address scale-out performance needs of applications across a range of use cases, from cloud to SmartNICs and enterprise networking, to power-constrained edge devices.
In addition, Neoverse N2 offers 40% higher single-threaded performance, compared to Neoverse N1, and retains the same level of power and area efficiency as Neoverse N1.
The building blocks for innovation and software that “just works”
One of our key goals is to provide partners the building blocks they need for continued innovation and design flexibility. Critical to this mission are our chip-level interfaces, which provide the opportunity to design system-level solutions. Our investment in both CCIX and CXL ensures our ecosystem can deliver relevant technology quickly and efficiently. Now not only are we providing leading edge cores, we are enabling partner solutions with fast fabric and high core count scalability.
In addition to our interconnect technologies, we see tremendous opportunity ahead for Neoverse and its supporting software ecosystem. But, that requires industry standards and initiatives like Project Cassini which aim to deliver a frictionless software developer experience. Through standards, platform security, and reference implementations, Project Cassini enables the industry to confidently deploy software on Arm that will “just work” (don’t miss Arm DevSummit in a few weeks for new details on this!).
Neoverse N2
Beyond that though, Arm continues to enable foundational infrastructure software. Operating systems and hypervisors, Xen, KVM, Docker containers, and, increasingly, Kubernetes have all announced support for Arm. The projects we once needed to nudge along are becoming self-supported and we’re seeing this evolve even further with commercial ISV applications.
Tip of the iceberg
A lot has happened in just the year I’ve been at Arm. Neoverse technologies are appearing in new server and SoC designs across the infrastructure world, and software and tools support has flourished. Developers see not only the performance and efficiency gains that Neoverse can deliver, but the broader design freedom and flexibility that comes with a new way of thinking about deploying infrastructure.
Based on that collaboration and hard work, I’m excited about what our ecosystem partners will be able to achieve in the future. The velocity of Neoverse has increased the pace of innovation in the infrastructure. What amazing things can we achieve together in the coming years?
Neoverse Remove Hindrance
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Neoverse Arm
