Qualcomm unveils its 10nm Centriq 2400 server processor

Qualcomm introduced its Centriq 2400 10nm server processor designed to bring greater efficiencies to data centers.

The new processor, which was developed by the Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) team over a five-year period, is based on the Qualcomm Falkor CPU, QDT’s own Armv8-based custom CPU core design.

Qualcomm says its Centriq 2400 delivers better performance per watt than competing Intel x86 server processors. According to tests cited by the company, an Intel Xeon Platinum 8176, which has similar performance as the new Centriq 2400 processor, burns over 2.5x as much electricity.

Qualcomm also optimized its design to run cloud software. Key characteristics include:

• High aggregate throughput performance with high per-thread performance under load
• A large number of hardware threads that multi-threaded software can fully utilize
• Quality of service (QoS) features to ensure resources are allocated fairly (i.e., avoiding the ‘noisy neighbor’ issue)
• High energy efficiency to maximize compute density and reduce operating costs
• Low acquisition costs
• Better performance-per-dollar versus Intel’s highest-performance Skylake processor: the 48-core Qualcomm Centriq 2460 processor has a list price of $1,995.

Key applications/workloads for Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processors are expected to include web front end, NoSQL databases, big data analytics, content delivery networks, video and image processing applications, image recognition, health-and life-sciences applications, and software defined NVMe storage farms.