“The release of our evaluation system is a major milestone for Qualcomm Technologies. As data centres evolve to support the exponential growth and innovation in data, connectivity and cloud services, Qualcomm is creating an ecosystem to meet the needs of these next generation data centres with Qualcomm-based server technologies,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president.
Targeted at hyperscale data centres, Qualcomm Technologies’ server SoC technology is designed to tackle common workloads, including Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, big data and machine learning. The 24 core SoC has been built on an advanced FinFet process and is said to integrate standard server class features, including PCIe and storage.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm has signed deals with Mellanox and Xilinx, for Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect and FPGA enabled dynamic workload acceleration respectively.
In November 2014, Qualcomm announced plans to develop ARM based chips targeted at data centres. At the time, CEO Steve Mollenkopf described the server market as ‘an interesting opportunity’ and noted: “We will have a server product. Qualcomm's road map at the high end is merging with what is feasible to put into a data centre.”
