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AMD, Broadcom and Qualcomm gave up. Applied Micro Circuits’ technology was acquired by Ampere and Cavium’s was bought by Marvell.
Marvell said last week it was going to market its Arm-based server technology as a customisable processor platform.
No one in the server game, it seems, wants discrete CPUs from anyone but Intel and AMD (x86 only).
So Marvell’s move to offer customisable Arm-based server chips seems like it’s shifting this product group to the bed next to the door.
Marvell says it regards the hyperscalers – Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, eBay, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent – as potential customers for customisable Arm-based processors but the hyperscalers are building their own Arm-based processors tailored to their specific workloads.
Why would they want something inherently less functional?
On the other hand, the manufacturers of general purpose servers can be assumed to want general purpose CPUs.
And then there’s the curiously named European Processor Initiative which uses American EDA to design a processor using Arm cores from Japan and RISC-V cores from the USA to be manufactured in Taiwan. European it ain’t.
Add to the mix a hundred developers of AI processors, of which about a quarter have announced silicon, and you have an army of participants vying for a slice of the server processor action.
With the three year lifetime of a datacentre server, and a $30 billion+ annual spend on server processors, the reason why this market attracts participants is obvious.
What is not so obvious is how many of the participants can survive
Yes robetc it is going to be used in European applications and it’s being paid for by European taxpayers and it’s being integrated in Europe from foreign IP blocks and will be owned and managed by a European company but, with the fab done abroad and the key bits of it coming from abroad, you wonder why make a general purpose processor, when horses-for-courses CPUs are the trend, and why give it a nationality? We don’t talk about the Yankee x86, or the Japanese Cortex. It has the whiff of an EU vanity project.
I once had a car like that, the body was Honda and the engine Peugeot. It had a “Leyland” starter motor so they called it a Rover…
I couldn’t agree more robetc but, that being the case, why make a big thing about it being a ‘European’ processor especially for European projects like supercomputers and fund it with European taxpayers’ money? In fact why do it at all?
I suppose “European” reflects the source of the effort behind bringing it to life. You are probably right about the justification, or otherwise, for doing it though.
Not quite fair on EPI. I coudn’t easily build a better doorbell without using services and parts from around the world. It would still be British when it hit the shops though.