China Shakes Up Arm Servers

64-core chip leapfrogs competition

by Rick Merritt, EETimes, Aug. 25, 2015 – 

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- A China-based startup described at the annual Hot Chips event here the most aggressive Arm-based server processor to date. In the same session, Oracle described its first Sparc processor with integrated Infiniband.

Little known Phytium Technology Co. Ltd., founded in 2012, described a processor using 64 custom Armv8 cores that will run at up to 2 GHz at 28nm. It can issue up to four instructions per cycle to hit up to 512 GFlops. The massive chip consumes 120W and fits in a 640mm2 die with about 3,000 pins.

The so-called Mars design surpasses existing high-end Arm-based server chips such as the 48-core ThunderX now sampling from Cavium and a high-end part still in the works at Broadcom. In February EZchip said it will ship a 100-core Armv8 made in a 28nm process, but it may not ship until 2017.

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