All this will have to be achieved while increasing power efficiency and minimising carbon footprint. To that end, the industry has been engaging with Arm’s Neoverse since its launch in 2018 to deliver the performance, power efficiency, specialised processing and workload acceleration that will be required. To date, the Neoverse compute portfolio has enabled Arm’s partners to adopt Arm-based solutions rapidly to address ever-changing customer and market needs.
Arm has now announced new additions to the Neoverse roadmap that are rooted in scalable efficiency and technology leadership, while continuing to support its partners and the rapid pace of innovation.
“We heard from our hyperscale and HPC customers that they needed to further push cloud workload performance without requiring more power and area. Our response is the Neoverse V2 Platform (“Demeter”) featuring our newest V-series core and the widely deployed Arm CMN-700 mesh interconnect,” said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm.
Arm already has multiple partners with designs based on the Neoverse V2 in progress, one of which is Nvidia who is leveraging V2 as the compute foundation for its Grace datacentre CPU.
“Grace will combine the power efficiency of V2 with the power efficiency of LPDDR5X memory to deliver 2x performance per watt over servers powered by traditional architectures,” said Bergey.
In addition, as part of Arm’s ongoing investment in efficient performance and efficient throughput, its next generation N-Series product is in development and will be available to partners in 2023. The N-Series CPU will be able to deliver generational increases in both performance and efficiency over the market leading efficiency of N2.
“Arm’s E-Series CPUs are extremely versatile across data plane processing, 5G RAN, edge networking, and accelerators to name a few. To support this diversity, we are delivering the Neoverse E2 Platform, which combines the Cortex-A510 CPU with the scalable Neoverse CMN-700 and N2 system backplane,” explained Bergey. “This allows the best of cloud technology in constrained applications: a scalable range of core counts, SystemReady compatibility, and PCIe, CXL, IO and interfaces. We are currently defining the next generation E-Series platforms.”
Neoverse platforms are purpose-built to address the full spectrum of accelerated infrastructure solutions where specialised processing is seen as crucial in reducing workload power consumption and meeting the increased compute requirements of modern workloads.
“However, it can’t be done with cores alone,” explained Bergey.
Arm has a long history of involvement in the open source software community in optimising full stack solutions to run on Arm.
“We have talked about Arm SystemReady and enabling a world of software that “just works”. From the architecture and IP to the libraries, runtimes and compilers, we’ve extracted maximum performance by leveraging the full spectrum of infrastructure software.,” explained Bergey. “Applications born in the cloud are built on microservices which communicate via APIs and leverage advantages of many modern software development tools and techniques, including containers and continuous delivery technologies with DevOps and agile methodologies.”
As all the major cloud providers are now offering Arm-based instances, Arm is collaborating with its cloud partners to optimise the cloud native software infrastructure, frameworks and workloads. These include contributions to widely adopted projects such as Kubernetes, Istio, and multiple CI/CD tools for providing native builds for the Arm architecture.
“We’ve enhanced machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and cloud software workloads such as open source databases, big data and analytics and media processing. This work is happening in collaboration with developers who are contributing to open source communities so all end users can build their next generation applications on Arm,” said Bergey.
“With the strength of the Arm software ecosystem combined with the power of Neoverse platforms and leading high performance fabrics such as AMBA CHI, UCIe and CXL, we’re empowering Arm partners with a strong recipe for developing customised solutions spanning cloud-to-edge,” added Bergey.
