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Cortex-A53 is used alone in higher and higher-end devices as the result of increased competition between MediaTek and Qualcomm
We’ve learned a lot during the last one a half years about the superiority of the Cortex-A53 cores for the mass produced SoCs. Some major points about that you see on the right:
My prediction back in Dec 23, 2013 was that The Cortex-A53 as the Cortex-A7 replacement core is succeeding as a sweet-spot IP for various 64-bit high-volume market SoCs to be delivered from H2 CY14 on. Such a prediction is a reality now as no less than 291 smartphones are listed as of today in PDAdb.net, which are using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 quad-core SoC based on Cortex-A53. The first such device, the Lenovo A805e Dual SIM TD-LTE was released in July, 2014.
Meanwhile Qualcomm’s downstream rival, MediaTek is moving up fast with its offerings as well. There are 8 devices based on quadcore MT6732M since Dec’14, 27 devices which based on quad-core MT6732 since Nov’14, and even 6 devices based on octa-core MT6753 since Jan’15. Note however that there are 3 such products from the Chinese brand Meizu, and one each from another local brands, Elephone and Cherry Mobile. Only the ZTE model is from a 1st tier global vendor yet.
My prediction was also proven by the fact that interest in that post was the highest on this blog as soon as the respective new SoCs, and commercial devices based on them arrived:
Now even higher end, octa-core smartphones based on Cortex-A53 alone are coming to the market from 1st tier device vendors
June 1, 2015: Asus ZenFone Selfie (ZD551KL)
(launched on the ASUS Zensation Press Event at Computex 2015)
from the product site:
ZenFone Selfie features the industry’s first octa-core, 64-bit processor — Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615. With its superb performance and superior power-efficiency you’ll shoot sharp photographs at stupefying speed, record and edit Full HD (1080p) video with minimal battery draw, and enjoy using the integrated 4G/LTE to share everything you do at incredible speeds of up to 150Mbit/s!
expected price in India: ₹12,999 ($205)
(Re: “coming in an incredible price” said in the launch video about the earlier ZenFone 2 (ZE551ML) which has the same price, but a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom Z3560 processor, only 5 MP secondary camera etc.)
from the ASUS Presents Zensation at Computex 2015 press release:
ZenFone Selfie is a unique smartphone designed to capture the best possible selfies, quickly and simply. Featuring front and rear 13MP PixelMaster cameras with dual-color, dual LED Real Tone flash, ZenFone Selfie captures beautiful, natural-looking selfies in gloriously high resolution. The rear camera features a large f/2.0 aperture lens and laser auto-focus technology to ensure near-instant focusing for clear, sharp pictures — even in low-light conditions where traditional cameras struggle.
ZenFone Selfie includes the brilliant ZenUI Beautification mode for live digital cosmetics. A few taps is all that’s needed to soften facial features, slim cheeks, and enhance skin tone to add vibrancy, and all in real time — injecting instant verve into any composition. ZenFone Selfie also has Selfie Panorama mode, which exploits ZenFone Selfie’s f/2.2-aperture front lens and 88-degree field of view to capture panoramic selfies of up to 140 degrees. With Selfie Panorama mode enabled, selfies become a party with all friends included — plus the ability to capture panoramic scenery for stunning backdrops.
ZenFone Selfie has a large 5.5-inch screen that fits in a body that’s a similar size to that of most 5-inch smartphones, for a maximized viewing experience in a compact body that fits comfortably in the hand. It has a high-resolution 1920 x 1080 Full HD IPS display with a wide 178-degree viewing angle and staggering 403ppi pixel density that renders every image in eye-delighting detail. ASUS TruVivid technology brings color to life in brilliant clarity, making selfies and other photos look their best. Tough Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4 covers the display to help protect against scratches and drops.
ZenFone Selfie features the industry’s first octa-core, 64-bit processor for the perfect balance of multimedia performance and battery efficiency — the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 615. This extraordinarily powerful chip equips ZenFone Selfie to provide the very best multimedia and entertainment experiences, carefully balancing high performance with superior power-efficiency.
June 19, 2015 by SamMobile: Samsung’s first smartphones with front-facing LED flash, Galaxy J5 and Galaxy J7, now official
Samsung has announced its first smartphones with a front-facing LED flash; the Galaxy J5 and the Galaxy J7. Specifications of these devices were previously leaked through TENAA, and their UI was revealed through Samsung’s own manuals. Now, they have been officially announced in China, where they would be available starting this week, but there’s no clarity about their international launch.
All the mid-range and high-end smartphones from the company released recently have started featuring high-resolution front-facing cameras, and the same is the case with the Galaxy J7 and the Galaxy J5. To complement their 5-megapixel wide-engle front-facing cameras, they are equipped with a front-facing single-LED flash. Other features include a 13-megapixel primary camera with an aperture of f/1.9, 1.5GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a microSD card slot, dual-SIM card slot, and LTE connectivity. Both these smartphones run Android 5.1 Lollipop with a new UI that is similar to that of the Galaxy S6 and the S6 edge.
The Galaxy J7 is equipped with a 5.5-inch HD display, a 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor, a 3,000 mAh battery, and is priced at 1,798 CNY (~ $289). The Galaxy J5 features a slightly smaller 5-inch HD display, a 64-bit quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor, a 2,600 mAh battery, and is priced at 1,398 CNY (~ $225). Both of them will be available in China in three colors; gold, white, and black.
The Galaxy J5 and J7 are targeted at the youth and compete with devices like the HTC Desire EYE, Sony Xperia C4, and the Asus ZenFone Selfie, all of which have high-resolution front-facing cameras with an LED flash.
May 6, 2015: Sony launches next generation “selfie smartphone” – Xperia™ C4 and Xperia C4 Dual
The selfie phenomenon is about to kick up a notch with the introduction of Xperia™ C4 and Xperia C4 Dual – Sony’s next generation PROselfie smartphones, featuring a best in class 5MP front camera, a Full HD display and superior performance.
“Following the success of Xperia C3, we are proud to introduce Sony’s evolved PROselfie smartphone,” said Tony McNulty, Vice-President, Value Category Business Management at Sony Mobile Communications. “Xperia C4 caters to consumers that want a smartphone that not only takes great photos, but also packs a punch. Benefiting from Sony’s camera expertise, the 5MP front-facing camera with wide-angle lens lets you capture perfect selfies, while its quality display and performance features provide an all-round advanced smartphone experience.”
We all like a high-profile selfie – so go ahead and get snapping:
You can now stage the perfect selfie, getting everything – and everyone – in shot, thanks to the powerful 5MP front camera with 25mm wide-angle lens. Sony’s Exmor RTM for mobile sensor, soft LED flash and HDR features means the pictures will always be stunning, even in those ‘hard to perfect’ low light conditions. Superior auto automatically optimises settings to give you the best possible picture and SteadyShot™ technology compensates for any camera shake.
With 13MP, autofocus and HDR packed in there is no compromise on the rear camera, which delivers great shots for those rare moments you’re not in the picture.
You will also be able to get even more fun out of your smartphone with a suite of creative camera apps such as Style portrait with styles including ‘vampire’ and ‘mystery’ to add a unique edge to your selfie. Moreover, apps such as AR maskgive your selfie a twist by letting you place a different face over your own face or others’ faces while you snap a selfie.
Experience your entertainment in Full HD
Now you can enjoy every picture and every video in detail with Xperia C4’s 5.5” Full HD display. Watching movies on your smartphone is more enjoyable thanks to Sony’s TV technology – such as Mobile BRAVIA® Engine 2 and super vivid-mode – which offers amazing clarity and colour brightness. Enjoy viewing from any angle with IPS technology.Great video deserves great audio to match, so Xperia C4 features Sony’s audio expertise to deliver crisp and clear audio quality. With or without headphones, you can sit back and enjoy your favourite entertainment in all its glory.
The design of Xperia C4 has also been crafted with precise detail and care to ensure every aspect amplifies the sharp and vivid display. A minimal frame around the scratch-resistant screen enhances both the viewing experience and the smartphone design, while its lightweight build feels comfortable in the hand. Xperia C4 comes in a choice of white, black and a vibrant mint.
Superior performance, with a power-packed battery that just keeps going
Whether you’re running multiple apps, checking Facebook, snapping selfies or listening to the best music – you can do it all at lighting speed thanks to Xperia C4’s impressive Octa-core processor. Powered by an efficient 64-bit Octa-core processor [Mediatek MT6752], Xperia C4 makes it easier than ever to multitask and switch between your favourite apps, without affecting performance. Ultra-fast connectivity with 4G capabilities means it’s quicker than ever to download your favourite audio or video content and surf the web without lag.
The large battery (2,600mAh) provides over eight hours of video viewing time, meaning that the entire first season of Breaking Bad can be binged uninterrupted, while Battery STAMINA Mode 5.0 ensures you have complete control over how your battery is used.
Xperia C4 is compatible with more than 195 Sony NFC-enabled devices including SmartBand Talk (SWR30) and Stereo Bluetooth® Headset (SBH60). You can also customise the smartphone with the protective desk-stand SCR38 Cover or with a full range of original Made for Xperia covers.
Xperia C4 will be available in Single SIM and Dual SIM in select markets from the beginning of June 2015.
For the full product specifications, please visit: http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-c4/specifications/
price in India: ₹25,499 ($400) and ₹25,899 ($408) for the Dual-SIM version
June 1, 2015: The stakes have been raised even higher by a higher-end octa-core SoC from MediaTek with 2GHz cores which is also 30% more energy efficient because of the first time use of 28HPC+ technology of TSMC
MediaTek Expands its Flagship MediaTek Helio™ Processor Family with the P Series, Offering Premium Performance for Super Slim Designs
P-series the first to use TSMC’s 28nm HPC+ process, which reduces processor power consumption
MediaTek, a leader in power-efficient, System-on-Chip (SoC) mobile device technology solutions, today announces the launch of the MediaTek Helio™ P10, a high-performance, high-value SoC focused on the growing demand for slim form-factor smart phones that provide premium, flagship features. The Helio P10 showcases a 2 GHz, True Octa-core 64-bit Cortex-A53 CPU and a 700MHz, Dual-core 64-bit Mali-T860 GPU. The Helio P10 will be available Q3 2015 and is expected to be in consumer products in late 2015.
The P10 is the first chip in the new Helio P family, a series which aims to integrate into a high-value chipset, premium features such as high-performance modem technology; the world’s first TrueBright ISP engine for ultra-sensitive RWWB; and, MiraVision™ 2.0, for top-tier display experiences. The features available in the P series include several of MediaTek’s premier technologies, such as WorldMode LTE Cat-6, supporting 2×20 carrier aggregation with 300/50Mbps data speed; MediaTek’s advanced task scheduling algorithm, CorePilot®, which optimizes the P10’s heterogeneous computing architecture by sending workloads to the most suitable computing device – CPU, GPU, or both; and, MediaTek’s Visual Processing Application – Non-contact Heart Rate Monitoring, which uses only a smartphone’s video camera to take a heart rate reading and is as accurate as pulse oximeters/portable ECG monitoring devices.
“The P series will provide OEM smartphone makers with greater design flexibility to meet consumer demands for slim form-factors, which provide dynamic multimedia experiences,” said Jeffrey Ju, Senior Vice President of MediaTek. “The P10 enables state-of-the-art mobile computing and multimedia features all while balancing performance and battery life.”
The Helio P10 is the first product to use TSMC’s 28nm HPC+ process, which allows for reduced processor power consumption. With the help of the latest 28HPC+ process and numerous architecture and circuit design optimizations, the Helio P10 can save up to 30% more power (depending of usage scenarios), compared to existing smartphone SoCs manufactured using the 28 HPC process.
“We are pleased to see MediaTek’s achievement in producing the world’s leading 28HPC+ smartphone chip,” said Dr. BJ Woo, Vice President, Business Development, TSMC. “As an enhanced version of TSMC’s 28HPC process, 28HPC+ promises 15% better speed at fixed power or 50% leakage reduction at the same speed over 28HPC. Through our competitive 28HPC+ technology and process-design collaboration with MediaTek, we believe MediaTek will deliver a series of products which benefit smartphone users across the world.”
As with the entire line of Helio SoCs, the P10 is packed with premium multimedia features. With a concentration on advanced display technologies, premium camera features, and HiFi audio, the P10 delivers leading functionality around the features most used on today’s mobile phones:
21MP premium camera with the world’s first TrueBright ISP engine:
Enables ultra-sensitive RWWB sensor to capture twice as much light as traditional RGB sensors in order to retain true color and detail, even in low light. The RWWB sensor also enhances the color resolution, even when compared with RGBW sensors.
Other features include a new de-noise/de-mosaic HW, PDAF, video iHDR, dual main camera, less than 200ms shot-to shot delay, and video face beautify.
Hi-fidelity, hi-clarity audio achieves 110dB SNR & -95dB THD
Full HD display at 60FPS with MediaTek’s suite of MiraVision 2.0 display technologies:
UltraDimming – Dimmer background lighting for more comfortable reading, even in low-light situations.
BluLight Defender – A built-in blue light filter that saves more power than conventional software applications.
Adaptive Picture Quality – Ensures the best picture quality when using different applications. True-to-life colors when in camera preview; vibrant colors when watching videos.
The MediaTek Helio P10 will be released in Q3 2015 and is expected to be available in consumer products in late 2015.
Note that Helio P1 is a significant step in MediaTek’s strategy already outlined in the following posts of mine:
– March 4, 2014: MediaTek is repositioning itself with the new MT6732 and MT6752 SoCs for the “super-mid market” just being born, plus new wearable technologies for wPANs and IoT are added for the new premium MT6595 SoC
– March 10, 2015: MediaTek’s next 10 years’ strategy for devices, wearables and IoT
Centaur Technology: Do the same job that an Intel processor can do, but doing it less expensively, with a much smaller group and Glenn Henry in charge
An October 11, 2014 teaser video (what might be behind see: Can VIA Technologies save the mobile computing future of the x86 (x64) legacy platform?). Glenn Henry on Wikipedia.
Their previous teaser was Coming very soon from Centaur Technology: A Leap Ahead in Chip Design [this same blog, Oct 9, 2014]
Coming very soon from Centaur Technology: A Leap Ahead in Chip Design
An October 8, 2014 teaser video (what might be behind see: Can VIA Technologies save the mobile computing future of the x86 (x64) legacy platform?)
2014 will be the last year of “free ride” in the smartphone and tablet spaces for ARM-based competitors of Intel – at least what Intel is insisting again
With 2013 performance of only 10 million tablet chip sets (for Windows mostly) Intel is still confident in its ability to deliver 40 million of those (with increased Android portion) in 2014. To achieve this they will be doing a lot of enabling across the industry to take the Bay Trail-based tablet BOM cost down to an equivalent level. They expect that the company’s overall margin will be hit just by 1.5% because of this required in 2014 effort. They are saying that Intel will be safe from 2015 on as moving to 14nm process technology with next-generation (even in terms of micro-architecture) Broxton and SOFIA SoCs for tablet and smartphone devices. They are basing this statement on their inherent “transistor density” advantage against TSMC from that point in time on, despite some analysts’ opinion of the economy of scale advantage of TSMC in terms of the number of wafers produced.
Meanwhile the possible direction of leading OEMs got a hint with New Acer CEO introduced to the media [Formosa EnglishNews, Jan 14, 2014]
With media generally reporting that Acer’s biggest mistake was its too early and too heavy bet on ultrabooks it is clear that OEMs will take a very cautious approach with Intel’s efforts to decrease the Bay-Trail based tablet costs down on the BOM level, as it is exactly what happened with ultrabooks. Instead the will try to solidify their tablet market position with ARM-based tablets in all segments of the tablet market, from the lowest cost upto the premium. Moreover, Jason Chen’s appointment to the CEO position of Acer is also showing that even for ongoing efforts OEMs need a very detailed and deep understanding of the SoC manufacturing and even the process technologies. Take note of Jason Chen’s history of employment in order to understand that:
- TSMC: 2005-2013
- Intel: 1991-2005
- IBM: 1991-1998
In other regards we only know that Acer to start new operation strategy in April to focus on BYOC (Build Your Own Cloud) [DIGITIMES, Jan 13, 2014] and that “In the future, all of Acer’s businesses including desktop, notebook and tablet will involve the BYOC platform and it is hoping to strengthen its product lines through the services.” It will be interesting to watch what that means as my previous conclusion was Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die! [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 7, 2013].
Now back to the Intel related information in terms of details in their earnings call. Note before that the correlation of Intel and Microsoft stock prices (as well that the stock market was absolutely not happy with Intel results and especially with the “flat 2014” outlook):
The company’s stance for 2014 is indeed not rosy as Intel to reduce global workforce by five percent in 2014 [Reuters, Jan 17, 2014].
From: Intel’s CEO Discusses Q4 2013 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, Jan 16, 2014]
Inserted slides are from Investor Meeting – Stacy Smith (CFO) [Nov 21, 2013] while the acompanying text is from Intel Shares Mobile Progress, Priorities and Product Pipeline at Annual Investor Day [Technology@Intel, Nov 25, 2013] if reference is not put underneath
[On transistor density and wafer cost]
Mark Lipacis – Jefferies
Thanks for taking my question. At the Analyst Day, you addressed your view on transistor density and your expectation for leadership on that vector, but I have to say this discussing that idea with investors is a consensus view that seems to be that Intel has an inherent wafer cost disadvantage that relative to TSMC that neutralizes or more than neutralizes your transistor density advantage and the argument is that TSMC ships more wafers and therefore has more better purchasing power than you and its lower labor cost, so net-net, they have just a big huge advantage of wafer cost that you should have a hard to, too hard of a time to overcome. So my question is do you think that’s a fair view. Can you help us talk to the relative elements of the wafer cost and how you think you can compare? Any kind of help that you give us on the cost dimension would be extremely helpful. Thank you.
From: CES: Process Will Still Win in Mobile, Says Intel’s Eul [Barrons.com, Jan 9, 2014]
Eul points out that Qualcomm, and other competitors such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (BRCM), all of whom are dependent on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to actually make the chips they design, will run into a problem as Taiwan Semi’s technology stops scaling.
Intel had made the point at the analyst day presentation, and Eul repeated it: As TSMC moves from 28 nanometer to 20 nanometer, it will run into a problem at the subsequent step, 16 nanometer, where TSMC will not add any real reduction in transistor size. That, says Eul, means that 16-nanometer parts a few years from now will be stuck at a 20-nanometer feature size while intel presumably zooms ahead to 10 nanometer by that time.
And what that means is that, unable to scale the density of a chip as Intel can, Qualcomm and Nvidia and Broadcom and the others will not be able to integrate as many parts as Intel on a single semiconductor die.
And so to those who point out that Intel hasn’t yet released its integrated baseband chip, Sofia, mentioned above, Eul contends the company will have the last laugh in a few years’ time as Qualcomm and the rest hitting a scaling wall.
Brian Krzanich – Chief Executive Officer
You know I think the first thing to remember is that what really counts in all of this is transistor cost and what we really talk about in our Moore’s Law of Curves and when we talk about transistor density is driving a consistent cost reduction of the transistors and so wafer cost is one segment of that. I’m not going to comment on you know TSMC’s wafer cost versus our wafer cost but we feel confident that our relative level of scaling and our internal wafer cost are such that we believe we have a leadership position in transistor cost.
When you’re talking about any product whatever it is, a logic product that’s a low-end microprocessor for wearable or internet of things or high-end Xeon server. You’re talking about the number of case and hence the number of transistors required to put that logic device together, it doesn’t matter whose technology it’s on to some extent. It doesn’t matter what node and so the more cost effective those transistors are whether it’s 500 million or 3 billion the lower the product cost there is and that’s really what we focus on and why we focus on transistor cost. So I think we stand by our what we said at the investor meeting.
[On tablets]
Brian Krzanich: Our disclosure in November of a new smartphone and tablet road map that will include SoFIA our first IA SSD with integrated comps later this year is further evident that we’re innovating and bringing products to market at faster pace. Looking ahead 2014 will be an exciting year as we build further on this new foundation. We have established a goal to grow our tablet volumes to more than 40 million units. Within an emphasis on the value segment. As we’re finishing 2013 with more than 10 million units and a strong book of design wins we’re off to a good start.
Stacy Smith: In the tablet market, we launched the Bay Trail SoC and have started to expand our footprint and market signature in this growing market.
The 4X Tablet Campaign: This year, Intel increased its focus on tablets with key design wins and the introduction of Bay Trail. Next year, Intel plans to increase tablet volumes by 4X! Eul signaled a rich pipeline of tablet and phablet design wins for Bay Trail including Android and Windows devices spanning price points from premium to sub $99 products from leading OEMs and the China tech ecosystem. He also said industry leading performance, competitive battery life, cost-reduced SOCs and unique features like 64 bit will help drive growth. Intel gave a first-time demo of the performance gains achieved with a 64 bit Bay Trail system running Windows and showed a 64 bit kernel running on an Android tablet.
Note the details about the 2014 tablet market of ~289+ million units in the 2014 will be the last year of making sufficient changes for Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet strategies, and those changes should be radical if the company wants to suceed with its devices and services strategy [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Jan 17, 2014] post of mine. The 40 million target of Intel is therefore less than 14% of that.
[regarding: So on the tablet strategy to get the 40 million you’re saying it’s going to be a 1.5 percentage hit.
CFO Commentary on Fourth-Quarter and Full Year 2013 Results
2014 Outlook
Gross Margin Reconciliation: 2013 to 2014 Outlook (59.8% to 60% +/- a few points)
– 1.5 points: Tablet impact
Let’s say you guys get into the second half of the year and you’re not quite to the 40 million if it’s a pretty significant short fall. Would you consider canning that strategy I guess I’m just wondering what the commitment is if the volumes aren’t there but the cost is there by the end of the year?]
Brian Krzanich: This isn’t a price reduction as normal price reduction would be; it’s not where you are just simply reducing. It’s truly a BOM cost equalizer and remember a lot of our 40 million tablets in ’14 will be based on Bay Trail. Bay Trail was originally designed for Avoton-based PC segments and the upper end tablet [and all Windows]. And so it’s what we are doing here is doing a BOM cast delta relative to the, what the mid and lower end tablets require. And so those are things like Bay Trail may require more layers of a printed circuit board for the board itself, more components on the board and tighter power management controls and things like that. We have a whole program to reduce those throughout the year. So that gives us confidence that as we go through the year, the BOM cast delta will shrink, but if the volume didn’t show up for some reason and I am not going to say that, that’s what’s going to happen, but I am confident it will, but if it didn’t it’s on a per unit basis. And so the spending on that contra would be reduced equivalently.
Stacy Smith: And I would just add as Brian said we are doing a lot of enabling across the industry to take the BOM cast out in equivalent. These are costs at the system level not at our chip level and it will vary a lot by SKU, but to give you a sense for a Bay Trail platform from the beginning of the year to the end of the year we think that, that BOM penalty drops by more than half. And so it kind of gets better out in time. And then when we get to the Broxton generation we think it’s de minimis.
Brian Krzanich: Both Broxton and SoFIA are just specifically designed to eliminate that delta.
Say “hello” to SoFIA: By the end of 2014, Intel will deliver a new integrated Atom processor + communications solution for entry and value smartphones and tablets, code-named SoFIA. In his presentation, Eul highlighted that Intel’s Infineon wireless assets make the company an “incumbent” in the mobile phone market, shipping more than 360M mobile platforms a year spanning 2G and 3G solutions. He said SoFIA builds on the proven 3G communications platform to deliver a competitive and highly integrated, IA-based mobile solution aimed at the fast-growing market for entry smartphones and tablets. The 3G version of SoFIA is expected by the end of 2014, and Eul said an LTE version would follow in the first half of 2015.
Accelerated Mobile Roadmap: While specific product details will be saved for a later date, Eul signaled a robust pipeline of new Atom processors and multi-comms solutions for 2014 and beyond to address devices spanning market segments from entry to performance smartphones and tablets, an approach he called “market-oriented pragmatism.” In addition to SoFIA, Eul noted:
…
-
Broxton – in 2015 Intel plans to deliver a 14nm, 64 bit SOC based on a new, next generation Atom architecture (Goldmont) targeted for hero devices. Broxton is being designed for pairing with Intel’s next generation LTE solutions.
[regarding: If we look at tablets and smartphone, what type of units do you need to reach for that business to stop having a material impact in gross margin from is 10 points higher utilization rates and excluding the contra revenue impact and that’s it? So just looking at the 40 million units target for this year, what type of volume do you need to get in order for gross margin to start appreciating from the west of the business if you exclude the contra revenue impact?]
Brian Krzanich: Yes, it’s hard to say. I mean, I will bridge back to our strategy here. Our strategy is that we are going to use our process technology leads. We will have leadership products that also are competitive or maybe even leadership in terms of cost and I showed some data at the investor meeting that just kind of showed the die size as we progress from Bay Trail to Broxton to SoFIA and so you can get a sense of the kinds of cost structure that we are going to have on a per unit basis. I don’t think it causes on a percentage basis. Yes, I can’t – I am not envisioning if this causes the gross margin percentage to go up, but you can definitely get to a space once we get through these contra enabling dollars where every unit we sell is accretive on a gross margin dollars per unit. It’s utilizing factories that we have in place for PCs. And so it’s a nice adder of that gross margin dollar per unit standpoint.
[regarding: Bay Trail Android tablets]
Brian Krzanich: Most of the Bay Trail Android tablets really start showing up more in Q2 than in Q1 and that’s again purely you know remember we made a shift, an original program for Bay Trail was all Windows. As we came into the midpoint of the year we sandbox [ph] shift and make it Windows and Android and so you know our OEM partners as well are targeting more towards Q2 and it’s just when you do you go and start putting back in that back to school event which is a next seasonal place where upside usually occur.
[regarding: On the smartphone or on tablet space, I think it is true that Intel has a manufacturing lead, but do you think your cost reduction efforts and then the Moore’s Law advantages ever progressed faster than the ASP declines in the space. In other words, do you think Intel can be sustainably profitable in the mobile space which is maturing?]
Brian Krzanich: Yes, we absolutely do. You saw at the investor meeting products like SoFIA, which really are going to be put on to 14-nanometer are fully integrated all the way through with the 3G option or an LTE option and that LTE is with carrier aggregation. Those kinds of products we believe are very, very cost competitive in fact leading from a cost position. In addition, we don’t talk a lot about, but we are already in that low cost Asia market. We are inch and then we are working with ODMs there. That’s actually where a lot of the innovations coming out of for some of these cost reductions on tablets and where we are getting the cost reduction ideas. So we are in that market now. We sold out of that Shenzhen low cost market in Q4. We will continue through it – through 2014 and with products like SoFIA on leading edge technology, we are very comfortable that we can get into those very low price points.
AMD’s dense server strategy of mixing next-gen x86 Opterons with 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 based Opterons on the SeaMicro Freedom™ fabric to disrupt the 2014 datacenter market using open source software (so far)
… so far, as Microsoft was in a “shut-up and ship” mode of operation during 2013 and could deliver its revolutionary Cloud OS with its even more disruptive Big Data solution for x86 only (that is likely to change as 64-bit ARM will be delivered with servers in H2 CY14).
Update: Disruptive Technologies for the Datacenter – Andrew Feldman, GM and CVP, AMD [Open Compute Project, Jan 28, 2014]
Note from the press release given below that: “The AMD Opteron A-Series development kit is packaged in a Micro-ATX form factor”. Take the note of the topmost message: “Optimized for dense compute – High-density, power-sensitive scale-out workloads: web hosting, data analytics, caching, storage”.
AMD to Accelerate the ARM Server Ecosystem with the First ARM-based CPU and Development Platform from a Server Processor Vendor [press release, Jan 28, 2014]
AMD also announced the imminent sampling of the ARM-based processor, named the AMD Opteron™ A1100 Series, and a development platform, which includes an evaluation board and a comprehensive software suite.
This should be the evaluation board for the development platform with imminent sampling.
In addition, AMD announced that it would be contributing to the Open Compute Project a new micro-server design using the AMD Opteron A-Series, as part of the common slot architecture specification for motherboards dubbed “Group Hug.”
From OCP Summit IV: Breaking Up the Monolith [blog of the Open Compute Project, Jan 16, 2013] … “Group Hug” board: Facebook is contributing a new common slot architecture specification for motherboards. This specification — which we’ve nicknamed “Group Hug” — can be used to produce boards that are completely vendor-neutral and will last through multiple processor generations. The specification uses a simple PCIe x8 connector to link the SOCs to the board. … How does AMD support the Open Compute common slot architecture? [AMD YouTube channel, Oct 3, 2013] Learn more about AMD Open Compute: http://bit.ly/AMD_OpenCompute Dense computing is the latest trend in datacenter technology, and the Open Compute Project is driving standards codenamed Common Slot. In this video, AMD explains Common Slot and how the AMD APU and ARM offerings will power next generation data centers.
See also: Facebook Saved Over A Billion Dollars By Building Open Sourced Servers [TechCrunch, Jan 28, 2014] |
The AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed “Seattle,” will sample this quarter along with a development platform that will make software design on the industry’s premier ARM–based server CPU quick and easy. AMD is collaborating with industry leaders to enable a robust 64-bit software ecosystem for ARM-based designs from compilers and simulators to hypervisors, operating systems and application software, in order to address key workloads in Web-tier and storage data center environments. The AMD Opteron A-Series development platform will be supported by a broad set of tools and software including a standard UEFI boot and Linux environment based on the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution.
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AMD continues to drive the evolution of the open-source data center from vision to reality and bring choice among processor architectures. It is contributing the new AMD Open CS 1.0 Common Slot design based on the AMD Opteron A-Series processor compliant with the new Common Slot specification, also announced today, to the Open Compute Project.
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AMD announces plans to sample 64-bit ARM Opteron A “Seattle” processors [AMD Blogs > AMD Business, Jan 28, 2014]
AMD’s rich history in server-class silicon includes a number of notable firsts including the first 64-bit x86 architecture and true multi-core x86 processors. AMD adds to that history by announcing that its revolutionary AMD Opteron™ A-series 64-bit ARM processors, codenamed “Seattle,” will be sampling this quarter.
AMD Opteron A-Series processors combine AMD’s expertise in delivering server-class silicon with ARM’s trademark low-power architecture and contributing to the Open Source software ecosystem that is rapidly growing around the ARM 64-bit architecture. AMD Opteron A-Series processors make use of ARM’s 64-bit ARMv8 architecture to provide true server-class features in a power efficient solution.
AMD plans for the AMD Opteron™ A1100 processors to be available in the second half of 2014 with four or eight ARM Cortex A57 cores, up to 4MB of shared Level 2 cache and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache. The AMD Opteron A-Series processor supports up to 128GB of DDR3 or DDR4 ECC memory as unbuffered DIMMs, registered DIMMs or SODIMMs.
The ARMv8 architecture is the first from ARM to have 64-bit support, something that AMD brought to the x86 market in 2003 with the AMD Opteron processor. Not only can the ARMv8-based Cortex A-57 architecture address large pools of memory, it has been designed from the ground up to provide the optimal balance of performance and power efficiency to address the broad spectrum of scale-out data center workloads.
With more than a decade of experience in designing server-class solutions silicon, AMD took the ARM Cortex A57 core, added a server-class memory controller, and included features resulting in a processor that meets the demands of scale-out workloads. A requirement of scale-out workloads is high performance connectivity, and the AMD Opteron A1100 processor has extensive integrated I/O, including eight PCI Express Gen 3 lanes, two 10 GB/s Ethernet and eight SATA 3 ports.
Scale-out workloads are becoming critical building blocks in today’s data centers. These workloads scale over hundreds or thousands of servers, making power efficient performance critical in keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) low. The AMD Opteron A-Series meets the demand of these workloads through intelligent silicon design and by supporting a number of operating system and software projects.
As part of delivering a server-class solution, AMD has invested in the software ecosystem that will support AMD Opteron A-Series processors. AMD is a gold member of the Linux Foundation, the organisation that oversees the development of the Linux kernel, and is a member of Linaro, a significant contributor to the Linux kernel. Alongside collaboration with the Linux Foundation and Linaro, AMD itself is listed as a top 20 contributor to the Linux kernel. A number of operating system vendors have stated they will support the 64-bit ARM ecosystem, including Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE, while virtualization will be enabled through KVM and Xen.
Operating system support is supplemented with programming language support, with Oracle and the community-driven OpenJDK porting versions of Java onto the 64-bit ARM architecture. Other popular languages that will run on AMD Opteron A-Series processors include Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The extremely popular GNU C compiler and the critical GNU C Library have already been ported to the 64-bit ARM architecture.
Through the combination of kernel support and development tools such as libraries, compilers and debuggers, the foundation has been set for developers to port applications to a rapidly growing ecosystem.
As AMD Opteron A-Series processors are well suited to web hosting and big data workloads, AMD is a gold sponsor of the Apache Foundation, the organisation that manages the Hadoop and HTTP Server projects. Up and down the software stack, the ecosystem is ready for the data center revolution that will take place when AMD Opteron A-Series are deployed.
Soon, AMD’s partners will start to realise what a true server-class 64-bit ARM processor can do. By using AMD’s Opteron A-Series Development Kit, developers can contribute to the fast growing software ecosystem that already includes operating systems, compilers, hypervisors and applications. Combining AMD’s rich history in designing server-class solutions with ARM’s legendary low-power architecture, the Opteron A-Series ushers in the era of personalised performance.
Introducing the industry’s only 64-bit ARM-based server SoC from AMD [AMD YouTube channel, Jan 21, 2014]
It Begins: AMD Announces Its First ARM Based Server SoC, 64-bit/8-core Opteron A1100 [AnandTech, Jan 28, 2014]
… AMD will be making a reference board available to interested parties starting in March, with server and OEM announcements to come in Q4 of this year.
It’s still too early to talk about performance or TDPs, but AMD did indicate better overall performance than its Opteron X2150 (4-core 1.9GHz Jaguar) at a comparable TDP:
AMD alluded to substantial cost savings over competing Intel solutions with support for similar memory capacities. AMD tells me we should expect a total “solution” price somewhere around 1/10th that of a competing high-end Xeon box, but it isn’t offering specifics beyond that just yet. Given the Opteron X2150 performance/TDP comparison, I’m guessing we’re looking at a similar ~$100 price point for the SoC. There’s also no word on whether or not the SoC will leverage any of AMD’s graphics IP. …
End of Update
AMD is also in a quite unique market position now as its only real competitor, Calxeda shut down its operation on December 19, 2013 and went into restructuring. The reason for that was lack of further funding by venture capitalists attributed mainly to its initial 32-bit Cortex-A15 based approach and the unwillingness of customers and software partners to port their already 64-bit x86 software back to 32-bit.
With the only remaining competitor in the 64-bit ARM server SoC race so far*, Applied Micro’s X-Gene SoC being built on a purpose built core of its own (see also my Software defined server without Microsoft: HP Moonshot [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 10, Dec 6, 2013] post), i.e. with only architecture license taken from ARM Holdings, the volume 64-bit ARM server SoC market starting in 2014 already belongs to AMD. I would base that prediction on the AppliedMicro’s X-Gene: 2013 Year in Review [Dec 20, 2013] post, stating that the first-generation X-Gene product is just nearing volume production, and a pilot X-Gene solution is planned only for early 2014 delivery by Dell.
* There is also Cavium which has too an ARMv8 architecture license only (obtained in August, 2012) but for this the latest information (as of Oct 30, 2013) was that: “In terms of the specific announcement of the product, we want to do it fairly close to silicon. We believe that this is a very differentiated product, and we would like to kind of keep it under the covers as long as we can. Obviously our customers have all the details of the products, and they’re working with them, but on a general basis for competitive reasons, we are kind of keeping this a little bit more quieter than we normally do.”
Meanwhile the 64-bit x86 based SeaMicro solution has been on the market since July 30, 2010, after 3 years in development. At the time of SeaMicro acquisition by AMD (Feb 29, 2012) this already represented a quite well thought-out and engineered solution, as one can easily grasp from the information included below:
1. IOVT: I/O-Virtualization Technology
2. TIO: Turn It Off
3. Freedom™ Supercomputer Fabric: 3D torus network fabric
– 8 x 8 x 8 Fabric nodes
– Diameter (max hop) 4 + 4 + 4 = 12
– Theor. cross section bandwidth = 2 (periodic) x 8 x 8 (section) x 2(bidir) x 2.0Gbs/link = 512Gb/s
– Compute, storage, mgmt cards are plugged into the network fabric
– Support for hot plugged compute cards
The first three—IOVT, TIO, and the Freedom™ Supercomputer Fabric—live in SeaMicro’s Freedom™ ASIC. Freedom™ ASICs are paired with each CPU and with DRAM, forming the foundational building block of a SeaMicro system.
4. DCAT: Dynamic Computation-Allocation Technology™
– CPU management and load balancing
– Dynamic workload allocation to specific CPUs on the basis of power-usage metrics
– Users can create pools of compute for a given application
– Compute resources can be dynamically added to the pool based on predefined utilization thresholds
The DCAT technology resides in the SeaMicro system software and custom-designed FPGAs/NPUs, which control and direct the I/O traffic.
More information:
– SeaMicro SM10000-64 Server [SeaMicro presentation on Hot Chips 23, Aug 19, 2011] for slides in PDF format while the presentation itself is the first one in the following recorded video (just the first 20 minutes + 7 minutes of—quite valuable—Q&A following that):
Session 7, Hot Chips 23 (2011), Friday, August 19, 2011. SeaMicro SM10000-64 Server: Building Data Center Servers Using “Cell Phone” Chips Ashutosh Dhodapkar, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie, Dhiraj Mallick, Jim Bauman, Sundar Kanthadai, Toru Kuzuhara, Gene Shen, Min Xu, and Chris Zhang, SeaMicro Poulson: An 8-Core, 32nm, Next-Generation Intel Itanium Processor Stephen Undy, Intel T4: A Highly Threaded Server-on-a-Chip with Native Support for Heterogenous Computing Robert Golla and Paul Jordan, Oracle
– SeaMicro Technology Overview [Anil Rao from SeaMicro, January 2012]
– System Overview for the SM10000 Family [Anil Rao from SeaMicro, January 2012]
Note that the above is just for the 1st generation as after the AMD acquisition (Feb 29, 2012) a second generation solution came out with the SM15000 enclosure (Sept 10, 2012 with more info in the details section later), and certainly there will be a 3d generation solution with the integrated into the each of x86 and 64-bit ARM based SoCs coming in 2014.
With the “only production ready, production tested supercompute fabric” (as was touted by Rory Read, CEO of AMD more than a year ago), the SeaMicro Freedom™ now will be integrated into the upcoming 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 based “Seattle” chips from AMD, sampling in the first quarter of 2014. Consequently I would argue that even the high-end market will be captured by the company. Moreover, I think this will not be only in the SoC realm but in enclosures space as well (although that 3d type of enclosure is still to come), to detriment of HP’s highly marketed Moonshot and CloudSystem initiatives.
Then here are two recent quotes from the top executive duo of AMD showing the importance of their upcoming solution as they view it themselves:
Rory Read – AMD’s President and CEO [Oct 17, 2013]:
In the server market, the industry is at the initial stages of a multiyear transition that will fundamentally change the competitive dynamic. Cloud providers are placing a growing importance on how they get better performance from their datacenters while also reducing the physical footprint and power consumption of their server solution.
Lisa Su – AMD’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Units [Oct 17, 2013]:
We are fully top to bottom in 28 nanometer now across all of our products, and we are transitioning to both 20 nanometer and to FinFETs over the next couple of quarters in terms of designs. … [Regarding] the SeaMicro business, we are very pleased with the pipeline that we have there. Verizon was the first major datacenter win that we can talk about publicly. We have been working that relationship for the last two years. …
… We’re very excited about the server space. It’s a very good market. It’s a market where there is a lot of innovation and change. In terms of 64-bit ARM, you will see us sampling that product in the first quarter of 2014. That development is on schedule and we’re excited about that. All of the customer discussions have been very positive and then we will combine both the [?x86 and the?]64-bit ARM chip with our SeaMicro servers that will have full solution as well. You will see SeaMicro plus ARM in 2014.
So I think we view this combination of IP as really beneficial to accelerating the dense server market both on the chip side and then also on the solution side with the customer set.
AMD SeaMicro has been extensively working with key platform software vendors, especially in the open source space:
The current state of that collaboration is reflected in the corresponding numbered sections coming after the detailed discussion (given below before the numbered sections):
- Verizon (as its first big name cloud customer, actually not using OpenStack)
- OpenStack (inc. Rackspace, excl. Red Hat)
- Red Hat
- Ubuntu
- Big Data, Hadoop
So let’s take a detailed look at the major topic:
AMD in the Demo Theater [OpenStack Foundation YouTube channel, May 8, 2013]
Note that the OpenStack Quantum networking project was renamed Neutron after April, 2013. Details on the OpenStack effort will be provided later in the post.
Rory Read – AMD President and CEO [Oct 30, 2012]:
That SeaMicro Freedom™ fabric is ultimately very-very important. It is the only production ready, production tested supercompute fabric on the planet.
Lisa Su – AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Units [Oct 30, 2012]:
The biggest change in the datacenter is that there is no one size fits all. So we will offer ARM-based CPUs with our fabric. We will offer x86-based CPUs with our fabric. And we will also look at opportunities where we can merge the CPU technology together with graphics compute in an APU form-factor that will be very-very good for specific workloads in servers as well. So AMD will be the only company that’s able to offer the full range of compute horsepower with the right workloads in the datacenter.
AMD makes ARM Cortex-A57 64bit Server Processor [Charbax YouTube channel, Oct 30, 2012]
From AMD Changes Compute Landscape as the First to Bridge Both x86 and ARM Processors for the Data Center [press release, Oct 29, 2012]
This strategic partnership with ARM represents the next phase of AMD’s strategy to drive ambidextrous solutions in emerging mega data center solutions. In March, AMD announced the acquisition of SeaMicro, the leader in high-density, energy-efficient servers. With this announcement, AMD will integrate the AMD SeaMicro Freedom fabric across its leadership AMD Opteron x86- and ARM technology-based processors that will enable hundreds, or even thousands of processor clusters to be linked together to provide the most energy-efficient solutions.
AMD ARM Oct 29, 2012 Full length presentation [Manny Janny YouTube channel, Oct 30, 2012]
Rory Read – AMD President and CEO: [3:27] That SeaMicro Freedom™ fabric is ultimately very-very important in this announcement. It is the only production ready, production tested supercompute fabric on the planet. [3:41]
Lisa Su – Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Units: [13:09] The biggest change in the datacenter is that there is no one size fits all. So we will offer ARM-based CPUs with our fabric. We will offer x86-based CPUs with our fabric. And we will also look at opportunities where we can merge the CPU technology together with graphics compute in an APU form-factor that will be very-very good for specific workloads in servers as well. So AMD will be the only company that’s able to offer the full range of compute horsepower with the right workloads in the datacenter [13:41]
From AMD to Acquire SeaMicro: Accelerates Disruptive Server Strategy [press release, Feb 29, 2012]
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a pioneer in energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers, for approximately $334 million, of which approximately $281 million will be paid in cash. Through the acquisition of SeaMicro, AMD will be accelerating its strategy to deliver disruptive server technology to its OEM customers serving cloud-centric data centers. With SeaMicro’s fabric technology and system-level design capabilities, AMD will be uniquely positioned to offer industry-leading server building blocks tuned for the fastest-growing workloads such as dynamic web content, social networking, search and video. …
… “Cloud computing has brought a sea change to the data center–dramatically altering the economics of compute by changing the workload and optimal characteristics of a server,” said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will become general manager of AMD’s newly created Data Center Server Solutions business. “SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth. By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market.”
ARM TechCon 2012 SoC Partner Panel: Introducing the ARM Cortex-A50 Series [ARMflix YouTube channel, recorded on Oct 30, published on Nov 13, 2012]
** Note that nearly 14 months later, on Dec 19, 2013 Calxeda ran out of its ~$100M venture capital accumulated earlier. As the company was not able to secure further funding it shut down its operation by dismissing most of its employees (except 12 workers serving existing customers) and went into “restructuring” with just putting on their company website: “We will update you as we conclude our restructuring process”. This is despite of the kind of pioneering role the company had, especially with HP’s Moonshot and CloudSystem initiatives, and the relatively short term promise of delivering its server cartridge to HP’s next-gen Moonshot enclosure as was well reflected in my Software defined server without Microsoft: HP Moonshot [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 10, Dec 6, 2013] post. The major problem was that “it tried to get to market with 32-bit chip technology, at a time most x86 servers boast 64-bit technology … [and as] customers and software companies weren’t willing to port their software to run on 32-bit systems” – reported the Wall Street Journal. I would also say that AMD’s “only production ready, production tested supercompute fabric on the planet” (see AMD Rory’s statement already given above) with its upcoming “Seattle” 64-bit ARM SoC to be on track for delivery in H2 CY14 was another major reason for the lack of additional venture funds to Calxeda.
AMD’s 64-bit “Seattle” ARM processor brings best of breed hardware and software to the data center [AMD Business blog, Dec 12, 2013]
Going into 2014, the server market is set to face the biggest disruption since AMD launched the 64-bit x86 AMD Opteron™ processor – the first 64-bit x86 processor – in 2003. Processors based on ARM’s 64-bit ARMv8 architecture will start to appear next year, and just like the x86 AMD Opteron™ processors a decade ago, AMD’s ARM 64-bit processors will offer enterprises a viable option for efficiently handling vast amounts of data.
From: AMD Unveils Server Strategy and Roadmap [press release June 18, 2013]
Note that AMD Details Embedded Product Roadmap [press release, Sept, 9, 2013] as well in which there is also a:
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The AMD Opteron processor came at a time when x86 processors were seen by many as silicon that could only power personal computers, with specialized processors running on architectures such as SPARC™ and Power™ being the ones that were handling server workloads. Back in 2003, the AMD Opteron processor did more than just offer another option, it made the x86 architecture a viable contender in the server market – showing that processors based on x86 architectures could compete effectively against established architectures. Thanks in no small part to the AMD Opteron processor, today the majority of servers shipped run x86 processors.
In 2014, AMD will once again disrupt the datacenter as x86 processors will be joined by those that make use of ARM’s 64-bit architecture. Codenamed “Seattle,” AMD’s first ARM-based Opteron processor will use the ARMv8 architecture, offering low-power processing in the fast growing dense server space.
To appreciate what the first ARM-based AMD Opteron processor is designed to deliver to those wanting to deploy racks of servers, it is important to realize that the ARMv8 architecture offers a clean slate on which to build both hardware and software.
ARM’s ARMv8 architecture is much more than a doubling of word-length from previous generation ARMv7 architecture: it has been designed from the ground-up to provide higher performance while retaining the trademark power efficiencies that everyone has come to expect from the ARM architecture. AMD’s “Seattle” processors will have either four or eight cores, packing server-grade features such as support for up to 128 GB of ECC memory, and integrated 10Gb/sec of Ethernet connectivity with AMD’s revolutionary Freedom™ fabric, designed to cater for dense compute systems.
From: AMD Delivers a New Generation of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon “Ivy Bridge” Processors in its New SeaMicro SM15000 Micro Server Chassis [press release, Sept 10, 2012]
AMD off-chip interconnect fabric IP designed to enable significantly lower TCO • Links hundreds –> thousands of SoC modules • Shares hundreds of TBs storage and virtualizes I/O • 160Gbps Ethernet Uplink • Instruction Set: Freedom™ ASIC 2.0 – Industry’s only Second Generation Fabric TechnologyThe Freedom™ ASIC is the building block of SeaMicro Fabric Compute Systems, enabling interconnection of energy efficient servers in a 3-dimensional Torus Fabric. The second generation Freedom ASIC includes high performance network interfaces, storage connectivity, and advanced server management, thereby eliminating the need for multiple sets of network adapters, HBAs, cables, and switches. This results in unmatched density, energy efficiency, and lowered TCO. Some of the key technologies in ASIC 2.0 include:
Unified Management – Easily Provision and Manage Servers, Network, and Storage Resources on DemandThe SeaMicro SM15000 implements a rich management system providing unified management of servers, network, and storage. Resources can be rapidly deployed, managed, and repurposed remotely, enabling lights-off data center operations. It offers a broad set of management API including an industry standard CLI, SNMP, IPMI, syslog, and XEN APIs, allowing customers to seamlessly integrate the SeaMicro SM15000 into existing data center management environments.Redundancy and Availability – Engineered from the Ground Up to Eliminate Single Points of FailureThe SeaMicro SM15000 is designed for the most demanding environments, helping to ensure availability of compute, network, storage, and system management. At the heart of the system is the Freedom Fabric, interconnecting all resources in the system, with the ability to sustain multiple points of failure and allow live component servicing. All active components in the system can be configured redundant and are hot-swappable, including server cards, network uplink cards, storage controller cards, system management cards, disks, fan trays, and power supplies. Key resources can also be configured to be protected in the following ways:Compute – A shared spare server can be configured to act as a standby spare for multiple primary servers. In the event of failure, the primary server’s personality, including MAC address, assigned disks, and boot configuration can be migrated to the standby spare and brought back online – ensuring fast restoration of services from a remote location.Network – The highly available fabric ensures network connectivity is maintained between servers and storage in the event of path failure. For uplink high-availability, the system can be configured with multiple uplink modules and port channels providing redundant active/active interfaces.Storage – The highly available fabric ensures that servers can access fabric storage in the event of failures. The fabric storage system also provides an efficient, high utilization optional hardware RAID to protect data in case of disk failure.
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We realize that having an impressive set of hardware features in the first ARM-based Opteron processors is half of the story, and that is why we are hard at work on making sure the software ecosystem will support our cutting edge hardware. Work on software enablement has been happening throughout the stack – from the UEFI, to the operating system and onto application frameworks and developer tools such as compilers and debuggers. This ensures that the software will be ready for ARM-based servers.
AMD developing Linux on ARM at Linaro Connect 2013 [Charbax YouTube channel, March 11, 2013] [Recorded at Linaro Connect Asia 2013, March 4-8, 2013] Dr. Leendert van Doorn, Corporate Fellow at AMD, talks about what AMD does with Linaro to optimize Linux on ARM. He talks about the expectations that AMD has for results to come from Linaro in terms of achieving a better and more fully featured Linux world on ARM, especially for the ARM Cortex-A57 ARMv8 processor that AMD has announced for the server market.
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AMD’s participation in software projects is well documented, being a gold member of the Linux Foundation, the organization that manages the development of the Linux kernel, and a group member of Linaro. AMD is a gold sponsor of the Apache Foundation, which oversees projects such as Hadoop, HTTP Server and Samba among many others, and the company’s engineers are contributors to the OpenJDK project. This is just a small selection of the work AMD is taking part in, and these projects in particular highlight how important AMD feels that open source software is to the data center, and in particular micro servers, that make use of ARM-based processors.
And running ARM-based processors doesn’t mean giving up on the flexibility of virtual machines, with KVM already ported to the ARMv8 architecture. Another popular hypervisor, Xen, is already available for 32-bit ARM architectures with a 64-bit port planned, ensuring that two popular and highly capable hypervisors will be available.
The Linux kernel has supported 64-bit ARMv8 architecture since Linux 3.7, and a number of popular Linux distributions have already signaled their support for the architecture including Canonical’s Ubuntu and the Red Hat sponsored Fedora distribution. In fact there is a downloadable, bootable Ubuntu distribution available in anticipation for ARMv8-based processors.
It’s not just operating systems and applications that are available. Developer tools such as the extremely popular open source GCC compiler and the vital GNU C Library (Glibc) have already been ported to the ARMv8 architecture and are available for download. With GCC and Glibc good to go, a solid foundation for developers to target the ARMv8 architecture is forming.
All of this work on both hardware and software should shed some light on just how big ARM processors will be in the data center. AMD, an established enterprise semiconductor vendor, is uniquely placed to ship both 64-bit ARMv8 and 64-bit x86 processors that enable “mixed rack” environments. And thanks to the army of software engineers at AMD, as well as others around the world who have committed significant time and effort, the software ecosystem will be there to support these revolutionary processors. 2014 is set to see the biggest disruption in the data center in over a decade, with AMD again at the center of it.
Lawrence Latif is a blogger and technical communications representative at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
End of AMD’s 64-bit “Seattle” ARM processor brings best of breed hardware and software to the data center [AMD Business blog, Dec 12, 2013]
AMD at ARM Techcon 2013 [Charbax YouTube channel, recorded at the ARM Techcon 2013 (Oct 29-31), published on Dec 25, 2013]
From: Advanced Micro Devices’ CEO Discusses Q3 2013 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, Oct 17, 2013]
Rory Read – President and CEO:
The three step turnaround plan we outlined a year ago to restructure, accelerate and ultimately transform AMD is clearly paying off. We completed the restructuring phase of our plan, maintaining cash at optimal levels and beating our $450 million quarterly operating expense goal in the third quarter. We are now in the second phase of our strategy – accelerating our performance by consistently executing our product roadmap while growing our new businesses to drive a return to profitability and positive free cash flow.
We are also laying the foundation for the third phase of our strategy, as we transform AMD to compete across a set of high growth markets. Our progress on this front was evident in the third quarter as we generated more than 30% of our revenue from our semi-custom and embedded businesses. Over the next two years we will continue to transform AMD to expand beyond a slowing, transitioning PC industry, as we create a more diverse company and look to generate approximately 50% of our revenue from these new high growth markets.
We have strategically targeted that semi-custom, ultra-low power client, embedded, dense server and the professional graphics market where we can offer differentiated products that leverage our APU and graphics IP. Our strategy allows us to continue to invest in the product that will drive growth, while effectively managing operating expenses. …
… Several of our growth businesses passed key milestones in the third quarter. Most significantly, our semi-custom business ramped in the quarter. We successfully shipped millions of units to support Sony and Microsoft, as they prepared to launch their next-generation game consoles. Our game console wins are generating a lot of customer interest, as we demonstrate our ability to design and reliably ramp production on two of the most complex SOCs ever built for high-volume consumer devices. We have several strong semi-custom design opportunities moving through the pipeline as customers look to tap into AMD’s IP, design and integration expertise to create differentiated winning solutions. … it’s our intention to win and mix in a whole set semicustom offerings as we build out this exciting and important new business.
We made good progress in our embedded business in the third quarter. We expanded our current embedded SOC offering and detailed our plans to be the only company to offer both 64-bit x86 and ARM solutions beginning in 2014. We have developed a strong embedded design pipeline which, we expect, will drive further growth for this business across 2014.
We also continue to make steady progress in another of our growth businesses in the third quarter, as we delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of revenue and share growth in the professional graphics area. We believe we can continue to gain share in this lucrative part of the GPU market, based on our product portfolio, design wins [in place] [ph] and enhanced channel programs.
In the server market, the industry is at the initial stages of a multiyear transition that will fundamentally change the competitive dynamic. Cloud providers are placing a growing importance on how they get better performance from their datacenters while also reducing the physical footprint and power consumption of their server solution.
This will become the defining metric of this industry and will be a key growth driver for the market and the new AMD. AMD is leading this emerging trend in the server market and we are committed to defining a leadership position.
Earlier this quarter, we had a significant public endorsement of our dense server strategy as Verizon announced a high performance public cloud that uses our SeaMicro technology and Opteron processor. We remain on track to introduce new, low-power X86 and 64-bit ARM processors next year and we believe we will offer the industry leading ARM-based servers. …
… Two years ago we were 90% to 95% of our business centered over PCs and we’ve launched the clear strategy to diversify our portfolio taking our IT — leadership IT and Graphics and CPU and taking it into adjacent segment where there is high growth for three, five, seven years and stickier opportunities.
We see that as an opportunity to drive 50% or more of our business over that time horizon. And if you look at the results in the third quarter, we are already seeing the benefits of that opportunity with over 30% of our revenue now coming from semi-custom and our embedded businesses.
We see it is an important business in PC, but its time is changing and the go-go era is over. We need to move and attack the new opportunities where the market is going, and that’s what we are doing.
Lisa Su – Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Units:
We are fully top to bottom in 28 nanometer now across all of our products, and we are transitioning to both 20 nanometer and to FinFETs over the next couple of quarters in terms of designs. We will do 20 nanometer first, and then we will go to FinFETs. …
… game console semicustom product is a long life cycle product over five to seven years. Certainly when we look at cost reduction opportunities, one of the important ones is to move technology nodes. So we will in this timeframe certainly move from 28 nanometer to 20 nanometer and now the reason to do that is both for pure die cost savings as well as all the power savings that our customer benefits from. … so expect the cost to go down on a unit basis as we move to 20.
[Regarding] the SeaMicro business, we are very pleased with the pipeline that we have there. Verizon was the first major datacenter win that we can talk about publicly. We have been working that relationship for the last two years. So it’s actually nice to be able to talk about it. We do see it as a major opportunity that will give us revenue potential in 2014. And we continue to see a strong pipeline of opportunities with SeaMicro as more of the datacenter guys are looking at how to incorporate these dense servers into their new cloud infrastructures. …
… As I said the Verizon engagement has lasted over the past two years. So some of the initial deployments were with the Intel processors but we do have significant deployments with AMD Opteron as well. We do see the percentage of Opteron processors increasing because that’s what we’d like to do. …
We’re very excited about the server space. It’s a very good market. It’s a market where there is a lot of innovation and change. In terms of 64-bit ARM, you will see us sampling that product in the first quarter of 2014. That development is on schedule and we’re excited about that. All of the customer discussions have been very positive and then we will combine both the [?x86 and the?]64-bit ARM chip with our SeaMicro servers that will have full solution as well. You will see SeaMicro plus ARM in 2014.
So I think we view this combination of IP as really beneficial to accelerating the dense server market both on the chip side and then also on the solution side with the customer set.
Amazon’s James Hamilton: Why Innovation Wins [AMD SeaMicro YouTube channel, Nov 12, 2012] video which was included into the Headline News and Events section of Volume 1, December 2012 of The Wave Newsletter from AMD SeaMicro with the following intro:
James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon called AMD’s co-announcement with ARM to develop 64-bit ARM technology-based processors “A great day for the server ecosystem.” Learn why and hear what James had to say about what this means for customers and the broader server industry.
AMD Changes Compute Landscape as the First to Bridge Both x86 and ARM Processors for the Data Center [press release, Oct 29, 2012]
Company to Complement x86-based Offerings with New Processors Based on ARM 64-bit Technology, Starting with Server Market
SUNNYVALE, Calif. —10/29/2012
In a bold strategic move, AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced that it will design 64-bit ARM® technology-based processors in addition to its x86 processors for multiple markets, starting with cloud and data center servers. AMD’s first ARM technology-based processor will be a highly-integrated, 64-bit multicore System-on-a-Chip (SoC) optimized for the dense, energy-efficient servers that now dominate the largest data centers and power the modern computing experience. The first ARM technology-based AMD Opteron™ processor is targeted for production in 2014 and will integrate the AMD SeaMicro Freedom™ supercompute fabric, the industry’s premier high-performance fabric.
AMD’s new design initiative addresses the growing demand to deliver better performance-per-watt for dense cloud computing solutions. Just as AMD introduced the industry’s first mainstream 64-bit x86 server solution with the AMD Opteron processor in 2003, AMD will be the only processor provider bridging the x86 and 64-bit ARM ecosystems to enable new levels of flexibility and drive optimal performance and power-efficiency for a range of enterprise workloads.
“AMD led the data center transition to mainstream 64-bit computing with AMD64, and with our ambidextrous strategy we will again lead the next major industry inflection point by driving the widespread adoption of energy-efficient 64-bit server processors based on both the x86 and ARM architectures,” said Rory Read, president and chief executive officer, AMD. “Through our collaboration with ARM, we are building on AMD’s rich IP portfolio, including our deep 64-bit processor knowledge and industry-leading AMD SeaMicro Freedom supercompute fabric, to offer the most flexible and complete processing solutions for the modern data center.”
“The industry needs to continuously innovate across markets to meet customers’ ever-increasing demands, and ARM and our partners are enabling increasingly energy-efficient computing solutions to address these needs,” said Warren East, chief executive officer, ARM. “By collaborating with ARM, AMD is able to leverage its extraordinary portfolio of IP, including its AMD Freedom supercompute fabric, with ARM 64-bit processor cores to build solutions that deliver on this demand and transform the industry.”
The explosion of the data center has brought with it an opportunity to optimize compute with vastly different solutions. AMD is providing a compute ecosystem filled with choice, offering solutions based on AMD Opteron x86 CPUs, new server-class Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that leverage Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), and new 64-bit ARM-based solutions.
This strategic partnership with ARM represents the next phase of AMD’s strategy to drive ambidextrous solutions in emerging mega data center solutions. In March, AMD announced the acquisition of SeaMicro, the leader in high-density, energy-efficient servers. With this announcement, AMD will integrate the AMD SeaMicro Freedom fabric across its leadership AMD Opteron x86- and ARM technology-based processors that will enable hundreds, or even thousands of processor clusters to be linked together to provide the most energy-efficient solutions.
“Over the past decade the computer industry has coalesced around two high-volume processor architectures – x86 for personal computers and servers, and ARM for mobile devices,” observed Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. “Over the next decade, the purveyors of these established architectures will each seek to extend their presence into market segments dominated by the other. The path on which AMD has now embarked will allow it to offer products based on both x86 and ARM architectures, a capability no other semiconductor manufacturer can likely match.”
At an event hosted by AMD in San Francisco, representatives from Amazon, Dell, Facebook and Red Hat participated in a panel discussion on opportunities created by ARM server solutions from AMD. A replay of the event can be found here as of 5 p.m. PDT, Oct. 29.
Supporting Resources
- AMD bridges the x86 and ARM ecosystems for the data center announcement press resources
- Follow AMD on Twitter at @AMD
- Follow the AMD and ARM announcement on Twitter at #AMDARM
- Like AMD on Facebook.
AMD SeaMicro SM15000 with Freedom Fabric Storage [AMD YouTube channel, Sept 11, 2012]
AMD Extends Leadership in Data Center Innovation – First to Optimize the Micro Server for Big Data [press release, Sept 10, 2012]
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000™ Server Delivers Hyper-efficient Compute for Big Data and Cloud Supporting Five Petabytes of Storage; Available with AMD Opteron™ and Intel® Xeon® “Ivy Bridge”/”Sandy Bridge” Processors
SUNNYVALE, Calif. —9/10/2012
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the SeaMicro SM15000™ server, another computing innovation from its Data Center Server Solutions (DCSS) group that cements its position as the technology leader in the micro server category. AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server revolutionizes computing with the invention of Freedom™ Fabric Storage, which extends its Freedom™ Fabric beyond the SeaMicro chassis to connect directly to massive disk arrays, enabling a single ten rack unit system to support more than five petabytes of low-cost, easy-to-install storage. The SM15000 server combines industry-leading density, power efficiency and bandwidth with a new generation of storage technology, enabling a single rack to contain thousands of cores, and petabytes of storage – ideal for big data applications like Apache™ Hadoop™ and Cassandra™ for public and private cloud deployments.
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system is available today and currently supports the Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1260L (“Sandy Bridge”). In November, it will support the next generation of AMD Opteron™ processors featuring the “Piledriver” core, as well as the newly announced Intel Xeon Processor E3-1265Lv2 (“Ivy Bridge”). In addition to these latest offerings, the AMD SeaMicro fabric technology continues to deliver a key building block for AMD’s server partners to build extremely energy efficient micro servers for their customers.
“Historically, server architecture has focused on the processor, while storage and networking were afterthoughts. But increasingly, cloud and big data customers have sought a solution in which storage, networking and compute are in balance and are shared. In a legacy server, storage is a captive resource for an individual processor, limiting the ability of disks to be shared across multiple processors, causing massive data replication and necessitating the purchase of expensive storage area networking or network attached storage equipment,” said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager of the Data Center Server Solutions group at AMD. “AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server enables companies, for the first time, to share massive amounts of storage across hundreds of efficient computing nodes in an exceptionally dense form factor. We believe that this will transform the data center compute and storage landscape.”
AMD’s SeaMicro products transformed the data center with the first micro server to combine compute, storage and fabric-based networking in a single chassis. Micro servers deliver massive efficiencies in power, space and bandwidth, and AMD set the bar with its SeaMicro product that uses one-quarter the power, takes one-sixth the space and delivers 16 times the bandwidth of the best-in-class alternatives. With the SeaMicro SM15000 server, the innovative trajectory broadens the benefits of the micro server to storage, solving the most pressing needs of the data center.
Combining the Freedom™ Supercompute Fabric technology with the pioneering Freedom™ Fabric Storage technology enables data centers to provide more than five petabytes of storage with 64 servers in a single ten rack unit (17.5 inch tall) SM15000 system. Once these disks are interconnected with the fabric, they are seen and shared by all servers in the system. This approach provides the benefits typically provided by expensive and complex solutions such as network-attached storage and storage area networking with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage
“AMD’s SeaMicro technology is leading innovation in micro servers and data center compute,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research. “The team invented the micro server category, was the first to bring small-core servers and large-core servers to market in the same system, the first to market with a second-generation fabric, and the first to build a fabric that supports multiple processors and instruction sets. It is not surprising that they have extended the technology to storage. The bringing together of compute and petabytes of storage demonstrates the flexibility of the Freedom Fabric. They are blurring the boundaries of compute, storage and networking, and they have once again challenged the industry with bold innovation.”
Leaders Across the Big Data Community Agree
Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO and Founder at Cloudera, the category leader that is setting the standard for Hadoop in the enterprise, observes: “The big data community is hungry for innovations that simplify the infrastructure for big data analysis while reducing hardware costs. As we hear from our vast big data partner ecosystem and from customers using CDH and
Cloudera Enterprise, companies that are seeking to gain insights across all their data want their hardware vendors to provide low cost, high density, standards-based compute that connects to massive arrays of low cost storage. AMD’s SeaMicro delivers on this promise.”
Eric Baldeschwieler, co-founder and CTO of Hortonworks and a pioneer in Hadoop technology, notes: “Petabytes of low cost storage, hyper-dense energy-efficient compute, connected with a supercompute-style fabric is an architecture particularly well suited for big data analytics and Hortonworks Data Platform. At Hortonworks, we seek to make Apache Hadoop easier to use, consume and deploy, which is in line with AMD’s goal to revolutionize and commoditize the storage and processing of big data. We are pleased to see leaders in the hardware community inventing technology that extends the reach of big data analysis.”
Matt Pfeil, co-founder and VP of customer solutions at DataStax, the leader in real-time mission-critical big data platforms, agrees: “At DataStax, we believe that extraordinary databases, such as Cassandra, running mission-critical applications, can be used by nearly every enterprise. To see AMD’s DCSS group bringing together efficient compute and petabytes of storage over a unified fabric in a single low-cost, energy-efficient solution is enormously exciting. The combination of the SM15000 server and best-in-class database, Cassandra, offer a powerful threat to the incumbent makers of both databases and the expensive hardware on which they reside.”
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000™ Technology
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server is built around the industry’s first and only second-generation fabric, the Freedom Fabric. It is the only fabric technology designed and optimized to work with Central Processor Units (CPUs) that have both large and small cores, as well as x86 and non-x86 CPUs. Freedom Fabric contains innovative technology including:
SeaMicro IOVT (Input/Output Virtualization Technology), which eliminates all but three components from the SeaMicro motherboard – CPU, DRAM, and the ASIC itself – thereby shrinking the motherboard, while reducing power, cost and space;
SeaMicro TIO™ (Turn It Off) technology, which enables further power optimization on the mini motherboard by turning off unneeded CPU and chipset functions. Together, SeaMicro IOVT and TIO technology produce the smallest and most power efficient motherboards available;
Freedom Supercompute Fabric creates a 1.28 terabits-per-second fabric that ties together 64 of the power-optimized mini-motherboards at low latency and low power with massive bandwidth;
SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage, which allows the Freedom Supercompute Fabric to extend out of the chassis and across the data center, linking not just components inside the chassis, but those outside as well.
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server Details
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server will be available with 64 compute cards, each holding a new custom-designed single-socket octal core 2.0/2.3/2.8 GHz AMD Opteron processor based on the “Piledriver” core, for a total of 512 heavy-weight cores per system or 2,048 cores per rack. Each AMD Opteron processor can support 64 gigabytes of DRAM, enabling a single system to handle more than four terabytes of DRAM and over 16 terabytes of DRAM per rack. AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system will also be available with a quad core 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon Processor E3-1265Lv2 (“Ivy Bridge”) for 256 2.5 GHz cores in a ten rack unit system or 1,024 cores in a standard rack. Each processor supports up to 32 gigabytes of memory so a single SeaMicro SM15000 system can deliver up to two terabytes of DRAM and up to eight terabytes of DRAM per rack.
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server also contains 16 fabric extender slots, each of which can connect to three different Freedom Fabric Storage arrays with different capacities:
FS 5084-L is an ultra-dense capacity-optimized storage system. It supports up to 84 SAS/SATA 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch drives in 5 rack units for up to 336 terabytes of capacity per-array and over five petabytes per SeaMicro SM15000 system;
FS 2012-L is a capacity-optimized storage system. It supports up to 12 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch drives in 2 rack units for up to 48 terabytes of capacity per-array or up to 768 terabytes of capacity per SeaMicro SM15000 system;
FS 2024-S is a performance-optimized storage system. It supports up to 24 2.5 inch drives in 2 rack units for up to 24 terabytes of capacity per-array or up to 384 terabytes of capacity per SM15000 system.
In summary, AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system:
- Stands ten rack units or 17.5 inches tall;
- Contains 64 slots for compute cards for AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors;
- Provides up to ten gigabits per-second of bandwidth to each CPU;
- Connects up to 1,408 solid state or hard drives with Freedom Fabric Storage
- Delivers up to 16 10 GbE uplinks or up to 64 1GbE uplinks;
- Runs standard off-the-shelf operating systems including Windows®, Linux, Red Hat and VMware and Citrix XenServer hypervisors.
Availability
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server with Intel’s Xeon Processor E3-1260L “Sandy Bridge” is now generally available in the U.S and in select international regions. Configurations based on AMD Opteron processors and Intel Xeon Processor E3-1265Lv2 with the “Ivy Bridge” microarchitecture will be available in November, 2012. More information on AMD’s revolutionary SeaMicro family of servers can be found at www.seamicro.com/products.
1. Verizon
Verizon Cloud on AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 [AMD YouTube channel, Oct 7, 2013]
Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, December 2013]
With enterprise adoption of public cloud services at 10 percent1, Verizon identified a need for a cloud service that was secure, reliable and highly flexible with enterprise-grade performance guarantees. Large, global enterprises want to take advantage of the agility, flexibility and compelling economics of the public cloud, but the performance and reliability are not up to par for their needs. To fulfill this need, Verizon spent over two years identifying and developing software using AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000, the industry’s first and only programmable server hardware. The new services redefine the benchmarks for public cloud computing and storage performance and security.
Designed specifically for enterprise customers, the new services allow companies to use the same policies and procedures across the enterprise network and the public cloud. The close collaboration has resulted in cloud computing services with unheralded performance level guarantees that are offered with competitive pricing. The new cloud services are backed by the power of Verizon, including global data centers, global IP network and enterprise-grade managed security services. The performance and security innovations are expected to accelerate public cloud adoption by the enterprise for their mission critical applications. more >
Verizon Selects AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 for Enterprise Class Services: Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage [AMD-Seamicro press release, Oct 7, 2013]
Verizon and AMD create technology that transforms the public cloud, delivering the industry’s most advanced cloud capabilities
SUNNYVALE, Calif. —10/7/2013
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Verizon is deploying SeaMicro SM15000™ servers for its new global cloud platform and cloud-based object storage service, whose public beta was recently announced. AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server links hundreds of cores together in a single system using a fraction of the power and space of traditional servers. To enable Verizon’s next generation solution, technology has been taken one step further: Verizon and AMD co-developed additional hardware and software technology on the SM15000 server that provides unprecedented performance and best-in-class reliability backed by enterprise-level service level agreements (SLAs). The combination of these technologies co-developed by AMD and Verizon ushers in a new era of enterprise-class cloud services by enabling a higher level of control over security and performance SLAs. With this technology underpinning the new Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage, enterprise customers can for the first time confidently deploy mission-critical systems in the public cloud.
“We reinvented the public cloud from the ground up to specifically address the needs of our enterprise clients,” said John Considine, chief technology officer at Verizon Terremark. “We wanted to give them back control of their infrastructure – providing the speed and flexibility of a generic public cloud with the performance and security they expect from an enterprise-grade cloud. Our collaboration with AMD enabled us to develop revolutionary technology, and it represents the backbone of our future plans.”
As part of its joint development, AMD and Verizon co-developed hardware and software to reserve, allocate and guarantee application SLAs. AMD’s SeaMicro Freedom™ fabric-based SM15000 server delivers the industry’s first and only programmable server hardware that includes a high bandwidth, low latency programmable interconnect fabric, and programmable data and control plane for both network and storage traffic. Leveraging AMD’s programmable server hardware, Verizon developed unique software to guarantee and deliver reliability, unheralded performance guarantees and SLAs for enterprise cloud computing services.
“Verizon has a clear vision for the future of the public cloud services—services that are more flexible, more reliable and guaranteed,” said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager, Server, AMD. “The technology we developed turns the cloud paradigm upside down by creating a service that an enterprise can configure and control as if the equipment were in its own data center. With this innovation in cloud services, I expect enterprises to migrate their core IT services and mission critical applications to Verizon’s cloud services.”
“The rapid, reliable and scalable delivery of cloud compute and storage services is the key to competing successfully in any cloud market from infrastructure, to platform, to application; and enterprises are constantly asking for more as they alter their business models to thrive in a mobile and analytic world,” said Richard Villars, vice president, Datacenter & Cloud at IDC. “Next generation integrated IT solutions like AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 provide a flexible yet high-performance platform upon which companies like Verizon can use to build the next generation of cloud service offerings.”
Innovative Verizon Cloud Capabilities on AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server Industry Firsts
Verizon leveraged the SeaMicro SM15000 server’s ability to disaggregate server resources to create a cloud optimized for computing and storage services. Verizon and AMD’s SeaMicro engineers worked for over two years to create a revolutionary public cloud platform with enterprise class capabilities.
These new capabilities include:
- Virtual machine server provisioning in seconds, a fraction of the time of a legacy public cloud;
- Fine-grained server configuration options that match real life requirements, not just small, medium, large sizing, including processor speed (500 MHz to 2,000 MHz) and DRAM (.5 GB increments) options;
- Shared disks across multiple server instances versus requiring each virtual machine to have its own dedicated drive;
- Defined storage quality of service by specifying performance up to 5,000 IOPS to meet the demands of the application being deployed, compared to best-effort performance;
- Consistent network security policies and procedures across the enterprise network and the public cloud;
- Strict traffic isolation, data encryption, and data inspection with full featured firewalls that achieve Department of Defense and PCI compliance levels;
- Guaranteed network performance for every virtual machine with reserved network performance up to 500 Mbps compared to no guarantees in many other public clouds.
The public beta for Verizon Cloud will launch in the fourth quarter. Companies interested in becoming a beta customer can sign up through the Verizon Enterprise Solutions website: www.verizonenterprise.com/verizoncloud.
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system is the highest-density, most energy-efficient server in the market. In 10 rack units, it links 512 compute cores, 160 gigabits of I/O networking, more than five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 terabyte high-performance supercompute fabric, called Freedom™ Fabric. The SM15000 server eliminates top-of-rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of unnecessary components for a more efficient and simple operational environment.
AMD’s SeaMicro server product family currently supports the next generation AMD Opteron™ (“Piledriver”) processor, Intel® Xeon® E3-1260L (“Sandy Bridge”) and E3-1265Lv2 (“Ivy Bridge”) and Intel® Atom™ N570 processors. The SeaMicro SM15000 server also supports the Freedom Fabric Storage products, enabling a single system to connect with more than five petabytes of storage capacity in two racks. This approach delivers the benefits of expensive and complex solutions such as network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networking (SAN) with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage.
For more information on the Verizon Cloud implementation, please visit: www.seamicro.com/vzcloud.
About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD) designs and integrates technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people everywhere to realize the full potential of their favorite devices and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information, visit www.amd.com.
correction…Verizon is not using OpenStack, but they are using our hardware.
@cloud_attitude
2. OpenStack
OpenStack 101 – What Is OpenStack? [Rackspace YouTube channel, Jan 14, 2013]
OpenStack: The Open Source Cloud Operating System
- OpenStack Shared Services (identity, image, telemetry, orchestration): code-named Keystone (OpenStack Identity), code-named Glance (OpenStack Image Service), code-named Ceilometer (OpenStack Metering), code-named Heat (OpenStack Orchestration)
- Compute: code-named Nova
- Networking: the original Quantum naming had to be phased out in April, 2013 and in June, 2013 was replaced by Neutron
- Storage: code-named Cinder (OpenStack Block Storage), code-named Swift (OpenStack Object Storage)
- Projects incubated in the upcoming Icehouse release started on Nov 7, 2013 and planned for release on April 17, 2014:
- Database Service (Trove) – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Trove
- Bare Metal (Ironic) – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic
- Queue Service (Marconi) – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Marconi
- Data Processing (Savannah) – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Savanna
Why OpenStack? [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, December 2013]
OpenStack continues to gain momentum in the market as more and more, larger, established technology and service companies move from evaluation to deployment. But why has OpenStack become so popular? In this issue, we discuss the business drivers behind the widespread adoption and why AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server is the industry’s best choice for a successful OpenStack deployment. If you’re considering OpenStack, learn about the options and hear winning strategies from experts featured in our most recent OpenStack webcasts. And in case you missed it, read about AMD’s exciting collaboration with Verizon enabling them to offer enterprise-caliber cloud services. more >
OpenStack the SeaMicro SM15000 – From Zero to 2,048 Cores in Less than One Hour [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, March 2013]
The SeaMicro SM15000 is optimized for OpenStack, a solution that is being adopted by both public and private cloud operators. Red 5 Studios recently deployed OpenStack on a 48 foot bus to power their new massive multiplayer online game Firefall. The SM15000 uniquely excels for object storage, providing more than 5 petabytes of direct attached storage in two data center racks. more >
State of the Stack [OpenStack Foundation YouTube channel, recorded on Nov 8 under official title “Stack Debate: Understanding OpenStack’s Future”, published on Nov 9, 2013]
The biggest issue with OpenStack project which “started without a benevolent dictator and/or architect” was mentioned there (watch from [6:40]) as a kind of: “The worst architectural decision you can make is stay with default networking for a production system because the default networking model in OpenStack is broken for use at scale”.
Then Randy Bias summarized that particular issue later in Neutron in Production: Work in Progress or Ready for Prime Time? [Cloudscaling blog, Dec 6, 2013] as:
Ultimately, it’s unclear whether all networking functions ever will be modeled behind the Neutron API with a bunch of plug-ins. That’s part of the ongoing dialogue we’re having in the community about what makes the most sense for the project’s future.
The bottom-line consensus was is that Neutron is a work in progress. Vanilla Neutron is not ready for production, so you should get a vendor if you need to move into production soon.
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Is the First Server to Provide Bare Metal Provisioning to Scale Massive OpenStack Compute Deployments [press release, Nov 5, 2013]
Provides Foundation to Leverage OpenStack Compute for Large Networks of Virtualized and Bare Metal Servers
SUNNYVALE, Calif. and Hong Kong, OpenStack Summit —11/5/2013
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that the SeaMicro SM15000™ server supports bare metal features in OpenStack® Compute. AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server is ideally suited for massive OpenStack deployments by integrating compute, storage and networking into a 10 rack unit system. The system is built around the Freedom™ fabric, the industry’s premier supercomputing fabric for scale out data center applications. The Freedom fabric disaggregates compute, storage and network I/O to provide the most flexible, scalable and resilient data center infrastructure in the industry. This allows customers to match the compute performance, storage capacity and networking I/O to their application needs. The result is an adaptive data center where any server can be mapped to any hard disk/SSD or network I/O to expand capacity or recover from a component failure.
“OpenStack Compute’s bare metal capabilities provide the scalability and flexibility to build and manage large-scale public and private clouds with virtualized and dedicated servers,” said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center Server Solutions, at AMD. “The SeaMicro SM15000 server’s bare metal provisioning capabilities should simplify enterprise adoption of OpenStack and accelerate mass deployments since not all work loads are optimized for virtualized environments.”
Bare metal computing provides more predictable performance than a shared server environment using virtual servers. In a bare metal environment there are no delays caused by different virtual machines contending for shared resources, since the entire server’s resources are dedicated to a single user instance. In addition, in a bare metal environment the performance penalty imposed by the hypervisor is eliminated, allowing the application software to make full use of the processor’s capabilities
In addition to leading in bare metal provisioning, AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server provides the ability to boot and install a base server image from a central server for massive OpenStack deployments. A cloud image containing the KVM, the OpenStack Compute image and other applications can be configured by the central server. The coordination and scheduling of this workflow can be managed by Heat, the orchestration application that manages the entire lifecycle of an OpenStack cloud for bare metal and virtual machines.
Supporting Resources
- Visit the AMD SeaMicro site
- Follow AMD on Twitter @seamicroinc
Scalable Fabric-based Object Storage with the SM15000 [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, March 2013]
The SeaMicro SM15000 is changing the economics of deploying object storage, delivering the storage of unprecedented amounts of data while using 1/2 the power and 1/3 the space of traditional servers. more >
SwiftStack with OpenStack Swift Overview [SwiftStack YouTube channel, Oct 4, 2012]
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server Achieves Certification for Rackspace Private Cloud, Validated for OpenStack [press release, Jan 30, 2013]
Providing unprecedented computing efficiency for “Nova in a Box” and object storage capacity for “Swift in a Rack”
3. Red Hat
OpenStack + SM15000 Server = 1,000 Virtual Machines for Red Hat [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, June 2013]
Red Hat deploys one SM15000 server to quickly and cost effectively build out a high capacity server cluster to meet the growing demands for OpenShift demonstrations and to accelerate sales. Red Hat OpenShift, which runs on Red Hat OpenStack, is Red Hat’s cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. The service provides built-in support for nearly every open source programming language, including Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java. OpenShift can also be expanded with customizable modules that allow developers to add other languages.
more >
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform: Community-invented, Red Hat-hardened [RedHatCloud YouTube channel, Aug 5, 2013]
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server Achieves Certification for Red Hat OpenStack [press release, June 12, 2013]
BOSTON – Red Hat Summit —6/12/2013
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that its SeaMicro SM15000™ server is certified for Red Hat® OpenStack, and that the company has joined the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. The certification ensures that the SeaMicro SM15000 server provides a rigorously tested platform for organizations building private or public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), based on the security, stability and support available with Red Hat OpenStack. AMD’s SeaMicro solutions for OpenStack include “Nova in a Box” and “Swift in a Rack” reference architectures that have been validated to ensure consistent performance, supportability and compatibility.
The SeaMicro SM15000 server integrates compute, storage and networking into a compact, 10 RU (17.5 inches) form factor with 1.28 Tbps supercompute fabric. The technology enables users to install and configure thousands of computing cores more efficiently than any other server. Complex time-consuming tasks are completed within minutes due to the integration of compute, storage and networking. Operational fire drills, such as setting up servers on short notice, manually configuring hundreds of machines and re-provisioning the network to optimize traffic are all handled through a single, easy-to-use management interface.
“AMD has shown leadership in providing a uniquely differentiated server for OpenStack deployments, and we are excited to have them as a seminal member of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network,” said Mike Werner, senior director, ISV and Developer Ecosystems at Red Hat. “The SeaMicro server is an example of incredible innovation, and I am pleased that our customers will have the SM15000 system as an option for energy-efficient, dense computing as part of the Red Hat Certified Solution Marketplace.”
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system is the highest-density, most energy-efficient server in the market. In 10 rack units, it links 512 compute cores, 160 gigabits of I/O networking and more than five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 Terabits-per-second high-performance supercompute fabric, called Freedom™ Fabric. The SM15000 server eliminates top-of-rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of unnecessary components for a more efficient and simple operational environment.
“We are excited to be a part of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network because the company has a strong track record of bridging the communities that create open source software and the enterprises that use it,” said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center Server Solutions, AMD. “As cloud deployments accelerate, AMD’s certified SeaMicro solutions ensure enterprises are able realize the benefits of increased efficiency and simplified operations, providing them with a competitive edge and the lowest total cost of ownership.”
AMD’s SeaMicro server product family currently supports the next-generation AMD Opteron™ (“Piledriver”) processor, Intel® Xeon® E3-1260L (“Sandy Bridge”) and E3-1265Lv2 (“Ivy Bridge”) and Intel® Atom™ N570 processors. The SeaMicro SM15000 server also supports the Freedom Fabric Storage products, enabling a single system to connect with more than five petabytes of storage capacity in two racks. This approach delivers the benefits of expensive and complex solutions such as network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networking (SAN) with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage.
4. Ubuntu
Ubuntu Server certified hardware SeaMicro [one of Ubuntu certification pages]
Canonical works closely with SeaMicro to certify Ubuntu on a range of their hardware.
The following are all Certified. More and more devices are being added with each release, so don’t forget to check this page regularly.
Ubuntu on SeaMicro SM15000-OP | Ubuntu [Sept 1, 2013]
Ubuntu on SeaMicro SM15000-XN | Ubuntu [Oct 1, 2013]
Ubuntu on SeaMicro SM15000-XH | Ubuntu [Dec 18, 2013]
Ubuntu OIL announced for broadest set of cloud infrastructure options [Ubuntu Insights, Nov 5, 2013]
Today at the OpenStack Design Summit in Hong Kong, we announced the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (Ubuntu OIL). The programme will test and validate the interoperability of hardware and software in a purpose-built lab, giving Ubuntu OpenStack users the reassurance and flexibility of choice.
We’re launching the programme with many significant partners onboard, such as; Dell, EMC, Emulex, Fusion-io, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, LSi, Open Compute, SeaMicro, VMware.
The OpenStack ecosystem has grown rapidly giving businesses access to a huge selection of components for their cloud environments. Most will expect that, whatever choices they make or however complex their requirements, the environment should ‘just work’, where any and all components are interoperable. That’s why we created the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab.
Ubuntu OIL is designed to offer integration and interoperability testing as well as validation to customers, ISVs and hardware manufacturers. Ecosystem partners can test their technologies’ interoperability with Ubuntu OpenStack and a range of software and hardware, ensuring they work together seamlessly as well as with existing processes and systems. It means that manufacturers can get to market faster and with less cost, while users can minimise integration efforts required to connect Ubuntu OpenStack with their infrastructure.
Ubuntu is about giving customers choice. Over the last releases, we’ve introduced new hypervisors, and software-defined networking (SDN) stacks, and capabilities for workloads running on different types of public cloud options. Ubuntu OIL will test all of these options as well as other technologies to ensure Ubuntu OpenStack offers the broadest set of validated and supported technology options compatible with user deployments. Ubuntu OIL will test and validate for all supported and future releases of Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS and OpenStack.
Involvement in the lab is through our Canonical Partner Programme. New partners can sign up here.
Learn more about Ubuntu OIL
5. Big Data, Hadoop
Storing Big Data – The Rise of the Storage Cloud [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, December 2012]
Data is everywhere and growing at unprecedented rates. Each year, there are over one hundred million new Internet users generating thousands of terabytes of data every day. Where will all this data be stored? more >
AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Achieves Certification for CDH4, Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Version 4 [press release, March 20, 2013]
“Hadoop-in-a-Box” package accelerates deployments by providing 512 cores and over five petabytes in two racks
The Hidden Truth: Hadoop is a Hardware Investment [The Wave Newsletter from AMD, September 2013]
Apache Hadoop is a leading software application for analyzing big data, but its performance and reliability are tied to a company’s underlying server architecture. Learn how AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000™ server compares with other minimum scale deployments. more >
Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung
Updates
Update: The Power of 8: MediaTek True Octa-Core [mediateklab YouTube channel, July 29, 2013]
Update: MT6592—The world’s first true octa-core SOC with scalable eight-core processing [product page, March 13, 2014]
Overview
MediaTek MT6592 is the world’s first heterogeneous computing SOC with scalable eight-core processing for superior multi-tasking, industry-leading multimedia features and excellent performance-per-watt. Based on 28nm HPM (High-Performance Mobile) process technology, MT6592 has eight CPU cores, each capable of clock speeds up to 2GHz.
Features
- ARM® Cortex®-A7 processor (1.7GHz or 2GHz)
- 28nm HPM process technology
- MAGE 3D graphics engine
- UMTS / HSPA+ R8 / TD-SCDMA / EDGE / LTE
- 801.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, GPS, FM tuner
- 16MP camera image signal processor
- Full HD H.265 / VP9 and Ultra HD H.264 video playback
- ARM Mali™ GPU (700MHz)
- MediaTek ClearMotion™ video enhancement
Update: [€147.18] Cubot X6 OctaCore MT6592 Phone Ultimate Slim Design 5″ OGS HD Retina [arif rachman YouTube channel, March 1, 2014]
Cubot X6 OctaCore MT6592 Ultimate Slim Design
Please follow the link below to see the full specification
http://bit.ly/CubotX6This is the latest phone from Cubot. Well.. the phone has the latest MT6592 1.7GHz processor. 28nm process, with quad core mali 450 GPU. Frequency is up to 700MHz. It supports full HD video with wide screen decoding format.
The true eight core processor can run simultaneously through advanced scheduling algorithm, dynamic temperature control and power management technology to optimize workload distribution to each core. When handling multiple tasks and heavy duty needs, achieve the peak performance of full eight core. At light load, you can turn off the core, the ultimate energy saving idle. It means substantial increase in cell phone battery life.
The Mali 450 graphics processor, overall performance is up to twice of the previous Mali 400. It supports full-HD 60fps. The triangles per second and render is 152M 2.8G pixels. Should be easy to run 3D games, smooth playback of 1080 HD videos. It also has a built in powerful MAGE 3D engine.
The front camera is 5 mega pixels while the back camera is 8 mega pixels. The camera is equipped with five pieces of high precision glass structure, which can effectively filter infrared blue glass. This is to achieve the level of professional SLR camera. Far better than ordinary lenses. The phone uses Sony sensor with latest 13Mega-Pixel CMOS Image Sensor.
In a week, the phone will be available at banggood for only $184.99 with free shipping worldwide! That’s an octa core phone below 200$ price tag! Not cheap enough?
Leave your email to get referred and get 10$ discount! Cheapest price out there!
Please follow the link below to see the full specification
http://bit.ly/CubotX6
IllusionMage [Wikipedia, excerpted on March 15, 2014]
IllusionMage is a paid for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software packages comprising the core engine of Blender, an open-source, 3D software suite, and bundled with materials related to Blender.
Other names this bundle has gone under are IllusionMage3D, 3DMagix, and 3DMagixPro.[1]
All materials and software included are freely available from other sources. The marketing of this program includes images that were stolen from other sources, often created with competing 3D applications. The image of the alleged creator of the software, Seth Avery, is a random stock photo.[2]
Criticism
IllusionMage has come under fire by many prominent Blender news sites and figures, including Ton Roosendaal, the founder of the Blender Foundation[3][4]
Related
“Illusion Mage & 3D Magix Pro (affiliate) domain names” Topic: Illusion Mage & 3D Magix Pro *is* a scam. KatsBits Forum. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
“Handsome young man isolated over white”. Laflor Photography via iStockPhoto. Retrieved 8 May 2012.
January 2011 Blender Foundation Press Release
“3DMagix and IllusionMage, scam or open source leeches?”. BlenderNation. Retrieved 30 September 2011.
Update: 联发科平板四核心MT8135 官方成绩曝光 (MediaTek MT8135 quad-core tablet exposure Official Results) [ 驱动之家 (MyDrivers.com), July 29, 2013]
Update: MediaTek’s Quad-core Tablet SoC MT8135 : Performance Benchmark [mediateklab YouTube channel, July 19, 2013]
Update: MediaTek Introduces Industry Leading Tablet SoC, MT8135 [press release, July 29, 2013]
TAIWAN, Hsinchu – July 29, 2013 – MediaTek Inc., (2454: TT), a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, today announced its breakthrough MT8135 system-on-chip (SoC) for high-end tablets. The quad-core solution incorporates two high-performance ARM Cortex™-A15 and two ultra-efficient ARM Cortex™-A7 processors, and the latest GPU from Imagination Technologies, the PowerVR™ Series6. Complemented by a highly optimized ARM® big.LITTLE™ processing subsystem that allows for heterogeneous multi-processing, the resulting solution is primed to deliver premium user experiences. This includes the ability to seamlessly engage in a range of processor-intensive applications, including heavy web-downloading, hardcore gaming, high-quality video viewing and rigorous multitasking – all while maintaining the utmost power efficiency.
In line with its reputation for creating innovative, market-leading platform solutions, MediaTek has deployed an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture. This technology enables application software to access all of the processors in the big.LITTLE cluster simultaneously for a true heterogeneous experience. As the first company to enable heterogeneous multi-processing on a mobile SoC, MediaTek has uniquely positioned the MT8135 to support the next generation of tablet and mobile device designs.
“ARM big.LITTLE™ technology reduces processor energy consumption by up to 70 percent on common workloads, which is critical in the drive towards all-day battery life for mobile platforms,” said Noel Hurley, vice president, Strategy and Marketing, Processor Division, ARM. “We are pleased to see MediaTek’s MT8135 seizing on the opportunity offered by the big.LITTLE architecture to enable new services on a heterogeneous processing platform.”
“The move towards multi-tasking devices requires increased performance while creating greater power efficiency that can only be achieved through an optimized multi-core system approach. This means that multi-core processing capability is fast becoming a vital feature of mobile SoC solutions. The MT8135 is the first implementation of ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture to offer simultaneous heterogeneous multi-processing. As such, MediaTek is taking the lead to improve battery life in next-generation tablet and mobile device designs by providing more flexibility to match tasks with the right-size core for better computational, graphical and multimedia performance,” said Mike Demler, Senior Analyst with The Linley Group.
The MT8135 features a MediaTek-developed four-in-one connectivity combination that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM, designed to bring highly integrated wireless technologies and expanded functionality to market-leading multimedia tablets. The MT8135 also supports Wi-Fi certified Miracast™ which makes multimedia content sharing between devices remarkably easier.
In addition, the tablet SoC boasts unprecedented graphics performance enabled by its PowerVR™ Series6 GPU from Imagination Technologies. “We are proud to have partnered with MediaTek on their latest generation of tablet SoCs” says Tony King-Smith, EVP of marketing, Imagination. “PowerVR™ Series6 GPUs build on Imagination’s success in mobile and embedded markets to deliver the industry’s highest performance and efficient solutions for graphics-and-compute GPUs. MediaTek is a key lead partner for Imagination and its PowerVR™ Series6 GPU cores, so we expect the MT8135 to set an important benchmark for high-end gaming, smooth UIs and advanced browser-based graphics-rich applications in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Thanks to our PowerVR™ Series6 GPU, we believe the MT8135 will deliver five-times or more the GPU-compute-performance of the previous generation of tablet processors.”
“At MediaTek, our goal is to enable each user to take maximum advantage of his or her mobile device. The implementation and availability of the MT8135 brings an enjoyable multitasking experience to life without requiring users to sacrifice on quality or energy. As the leader in multi-core processing solutions, we are constantly optimizing these capabilities to bring them into the mainstream, so as to make them accessible to every user around the world,” said Joe Chen, GM of the Home Entertainment Business Unit at MediaTek.
The MT8135 is the latest SoC in MediaTek’s highly successful line of quad-core processors, which since its launch last December has given rise to more than 350 projects and over 150 mobile device models across the world. This latest solution, along with its comprehensive accompanying Reference Design, will like their predecessors fast become industry standards, particularly in the high-end tablet space.
Update: Optimized big. LITTLE – MediaTek [MediaTek, July 29, 2013]
Multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) design has brought tremendous benefits to mobile device users by offering seamless engagement in rigorous multitasking. To overcome the issue with high energy consumption and thermal readings, MediaTek is deploying an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture. The technology will allow applications software to simultaneously access all the processors in the big.LITTLE™ cluster for a true heterogeneous experience, activating both of its CPU clusters concurrently for extreme performance.
Optimized big. LITTLE™
ARM big.LITTLE™ processing is designed to address the energy and thermal issues associated with multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. It allows for the creation of dual-cluster SoCs, with one more powerful (big) cluster for processing intensive tasks and a less powerful (LITTLE) cluster for executing routine functions. MediaTek is among the first SoC designers to have adopted this ground-breaking technology. Unlike its counterparts, however, the company has done so in a manner that affords device users the utmost energy and thermal efficiency rates.
Enabling Heterogeneous Multi-Processing
Of the three big.LITTLE™ software models that can be integrated, for example, MediaTek chose the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing [developed and named by ARM as Global Task Scheduling (GTS), also known earlier as big.LITTLE MP, see in the last section of this post in detail] approach, which unlike the other two methods – Cluster- [as was implemented in Galaxy S4 by Samsung with Exynos 5 SoC having 4xA7+4xA15 configuration] and CPU-Migration [IKS (In Kernel Switcher) developed by Linaro, see in the last section of this post in detail] – allows for individual cores to be activated as and when needed for maximum efficiency.
However, use of the most versatile model isn’t MediaTek’s only advantage. In line with its reputation for creating innovative, market-leading platform solutions, MediaTek has deployed an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture.
The technology will allow applications software to simultaneously access all the processors in the big.LITTLE™ cluster for a true heterogeneous experience, activating both of its CPU clusters concurrently for extreme performance.
In comparison, the current octa-core SoC solution, utilizes one of the more inferior big.LITTLE™ software models. As a result, the processor is not as efficient as it otherwise might be.
As the first company to enable Heterogeneous Multi-Processing on a mobile SoC in the form of its MT8135 Reference Design, MediaTek is uniquely positioned to support the next wave of tablet and mobile devices.
Update: Optimized ARM big.LITTLETM – MediaTek Enables ARM big.LITTLETM Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Technology in Mobile SoCs [MediaTek Position Paper in PDF, July 29, 2013]
MediaTek MT8135 brings PowerVR Series6 GPUs to a mobile device near you [With Imagination Blog, July 29, 2013]
Over the years, our close partnership with MediaTek has resulted in the release of some very innovative platforms that have set important benchmarks for high-end gaming, smooth UIs and advanced browser-based graphics-rich applications in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Two recent examples include:
- MT8125/MT8389, an extension of MediaTek’s highly successful quad-core portfolio which integrates power-efficient PowerVR Series5XT graphics that deliver compelling multimedia features and sophisticated user experiences
- MT8135, the first in a series of PowerVR Series6-based mobile chipsets that are due to be announced in the second half of this year
MediaTek has been steadily establishing itself as an important global player for consumer products like smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, with a strong foothold in Latin America and Asia, and a rapidly growing presence in Europe and North America. Earlier this year, MediaTek introduced MT8125, one of their most successful tablet chipsets for high-end multimedia capabilities.
While MT8125 has been extremely popular with OEMs including Asus, Acer or Lenovo, MT8135 has the potential to consolidate Mediatek’s existing customer base and open up exciting new opportunities thanks to the advanced feature set provided by Imagination’s PowerVR ‘Rogue’ architecture.
MT8135 is a quad-core SoC that aims for the middle- to high-end tier of the tablet OEM market. It supports a 4-in-1 connectivity package that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM radio, all developed in-house by MediaTek. Miracast is another important addition to the multimedia package, enabling devices using MT8135 to stream high-resolution content more easily to compatible displays, over wireless networks.
MT8135 incorporates a PowerVR G6200 GPU [from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230] from Imagination that enables advanced mobile graphics and compute applications for the mainstream consumer market, including fast gaming, 3D navigation and location-based services, camera vision, image processing, augmented reality applications, and smooth, high-resolution user interfaces.
As MT8135-powered mobile devices start appearing in the market, developers will have access to new technologies and features introduced by our PowerVR Series6 family such as:
- our latest-generation tile based deferred rendering (TBDR) architecture implemented on universal scalable clusters (USC)
- high-efficiency compression technologies that reduce memory bandwidth requirements, including lossless geometry compression and PVRTC/PVRTC2 texture compression
- scalar processing to guarantee highest ALU utilization and easy programming
Thanks to the PowerVR G6200 GPU inside the MT8135 application processor, MediaTek brings high-quality, low-power graphics to unprecedented levels by delivering up to four times more ALU horsepower compared to MT8125, its PowerVR Series5XT-based predecessor. PowerVR G6200 fully supports a wide range of graphics APIs including OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, OpenGL 3.x, 4.x and DirectX 10_1, along with compute programming interfaces such as OpenCL 1.x, Renderscript and Filterscript.
By partnering up with Imagination, MediaTek has access to our industry-leading PowerVR graphics, worldwide technical support, and a strong ecosystem of Android developers capable of making the most of our technology. We look forward to shortly seeing our brand-new PowerVR Series6 GPUs in the hands of millions of consumers, and see MediaTek as one of our strategic partners for our latest generation PowerVR GPUs moving forward.
End of Updates
This report consists of the following parts:
- The latest MediaTek roadmap, high-end and OS strategy
- News reports about MT6592 and its first application
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013] Efficient video playback:
When on decoding mode, the battery used for decoding HEVC (H.265) FHD video
can be reduced by up to 18 percent compared to current quad-core solutions
(from MediaTek True Octa-Core Position Paper [MediaTek, July 23, 2013])- What is new vs. my earlier The state of big.LITTLE processing [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 7, 2013] report
For the preceding smartphone SoC in the current roadmap see MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA is available for Android smartphones and tablets of Q1 delivery [‘Experiencing the cloud’, Dec 12, 2012]. For smartphone SoCs before that see Boosting the MediaTek MT6575 success story with the MT6577 announcement – UPDATED with MT6588/83 coming early 2013 in Q42012 and 8-core MT6599 in 2013 [‘Experiencing the cloud’, June 27, July 27, Sept 11-13, Sept 26, Oct 2, 2012]. Note that MT6588 was renamed MT6589 when was launched, as MT6599 would be renamed MT6592 now.
The latest MediaTek roadmap, high-end and OS strategy
Maybank Kim Eng just published in its MediaTek Closing In Fast [July 17, 2013] report the following two SoC roadmaps:
GPU for MT6592 smartphone SoCs (and presumably for MT6588 as well) will be Mali according to Zhu Shangzu (朱尚祖), MediaTek Global Smartphone General Manager in the [Part 2] MediaTek to push 8 small cores, the mystery [ESM 国际电子商情 (International Electronic Business), July 18, 2013] exclusive interview.
According to 28nm Technology [TSMC, June 21, 2011] description: The 28nm technology node of the TSMC foundry (which is used for manufacturing by MediaTek) has a high performance (HP) process as the first option to use high-k metal gate (HKMG) process technology. The 28nm low power with high-k metal gates (HPL) technology, as the second option, adopts the same gate stack as HP technology while meeting more stringent low leakage requirements with a trade of performance speed. Explanation: From about 10 µm (1971) to below 0.1 µm (100 nm) conventional silicon oxynitride as the gate insulator with polysilicon gate, so called poly/SiON gate stack, was used for CMOS technology. It was typically possible to scale down to 45 nm (2008), only TSMC was able to scale it down further to 28 nm in which most of the current 28nm SoCs from TSMC are produced. While Intel (and IBM) had to introduce high-K dielectric as the gate insulator with metal gate, so called High-k / Metal Gate stack, for the performance of their 45 nm products in 2008 (in order to continue with the Moore’s law in their realm) as you could see on the right (taken from Life With “Penryn” [DailyTech, Jan 27, 2007] interview with Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow, and Steve Smith, Intel Vice President DEG Group Operations), TMSC could introduce that only on the 28nm node as described above. The HKMG based 28nm SoCs are much higher performance (or higher performance still with low power by HPL) as you could see from the 2GHz clockrate of the MT6592 (above) or MT8315 (below) vs. that of the convential poly/SiON counterparts, MT6589 and MT8389 with 1.2GHz.
Complementary post reminder: H2CY13: Upcoming next-gen Nexus 7, the ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7 “re-incarnation” at reduced by $50 price, dual/quad-core mid-range tablets from white-box vendors starting from $65 [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 5, 2013] in which there is plenty of information regarding the non high-end tablet SoCs, from MediaTek (MediaTek MT8125, MediaTek MT8377 and MediaTek MT8389) as well as competition from Allwinner and Rockchip. The pre-eminent ASUS MeMO Pad™ HD 7 described in detail there is using the MT8125 SoC, while the new Nexus 7 (to be announced before the ending of July) the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Quad Core SoC. In that sense we got with that post not only a complete H2 competitive tablet market picture for mid-range but some information regarding the new Qualcomm high-end as well.
For the upcoming MT8135 tablet SoC it is known from the part 3 of the Zhu Shangzu interview that the quad-core configuration will be 2xA15+2xA7, which means a big.LITTLE architecture and quite probably the already mature ‘In Kernel Switcher’ (IKS) scheduler initially GTS with MediaTek’s “advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management” and called Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) by MediaTek (see in the updates in front of the original post). But as As ARM already decided on the architecture of the other, more general ‘Global Task Scheduling’ (GTS) solution (see much below) I would assume that the proper hardware underpinnings for GTS will already be built in (unlike in the Samsung’s Exynos 5 SoC released before), so when the scheduler software will be mature enough it will run well on MT8135. The inclusion of just two cores of each (unlike in Exynos 5) is a very strong proof-point of that. As far as the GPU is concerned we know from Zhu Shangzu interview that an Imagination GPU will be used, therefore I will leave the next-generation SGX6XX (PowerVR Series6 or ‘Rogue’) indication in the above table. Update: It is the PowerVR G6200 GPU [from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230] as you could see from Imagination block post published on the MT8135 announcement (July 29), and included here in front of the original post.
with the following commentary:
Strong fundamentals intact. Having exceeded its 2Q13 guidance so significantly, we believe MTK will continue to ride the strong momentum in 3Q13, perhaps growing its revenue by low-to-mid-teens QoQ or 30% YoY to chalk up another record high of TWD36-38b [US$1.2-1.27B]. Importantly, a better product mix and cost structure would help lift its profitability to ±44%. We expect MTK to ship 70-72m units of smart devices, up 25-30% QoQ, with quad-core APs and tablets making up nearly 50% of total shipment. The benefits of operating leverage should drive OPM past 20%, the highest since 3Q10. MTK is set to report its 2Q13 results in late July or early August and we forecast net profit of TWD6.8b [US$227M] (EPS: TWD5.02; Street: TWD6.3b), up over 80% QoQ and 100% YoY. GM is also likely to meet the high end of its guidance, ie, 43.5%, on richer mix and improved cost structure. Reported revenue of TWD33.3b, up almost 40% QoQ and 42%YoY, is already well ahead of guidance (TWD30-32b). However, we cut our FY13/14 earnings forecasts by 3% each to factor in the delay in merger with MStar and potential inventory correction in 4Q13/1Q14. MTK remains a key BUY in our tech space.
Closing in fast on QCOM. MTK has spared no efforts to enhance its smart device portfolio since 2H12 and further signs of acceleration are evident. It is introducing two high-end APs in 4Q13 – MT6588 and MT6592 – using 28nm HKMG and advanced graphic features. While the former is a quad-core AP operating at 1.7GHz, the latter is capable of running at 2GHz (when all eight core engines are turned on). In the absence of full details, we estimate MT6592 may perform closer to Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 AP (used in Galaxy S4 and HTC One), while MT6588 should outshine Snapdragon 400. MTK has won several international OEMs with MT6589 and with MT6588/6592, its chances of penetrating tier-1 OEMs have increased significantly. In addition, it will sample its high-end 4G/LTE/LTE-TDSCDMA modem chipset in anticipation of the launch of 4G network in China later this year. As for tablets, MTK’s latest APs MT8125/8389 were well-received and it is set to deliver the high-end MT8135 (big.Little design) in 3Q13. We expect its smartphone/tablet shipments to reach 200-225m/25m units in 2013.
In the same part of the interview Zhu Shangzu explained MediaTek’s high-end strategy as follows (as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits):
… I think the future of high-end smartphones innovation will focus on the expansion of big screen multimedia applications, and this is our direction. …
Judging from the current situation, customers of high-end flagship phones are still using the products of the competitors, but there is flagship in our quad-core case as well, and OPPO, Vivo and GiONEE and other quad-core phones are also very popular. Our next goal is to get the customers of flagship machines using our platform via helping customers to achieve stronger performance on the big screen multimedia.
Therefore, the 8-core MT6592 can be regarded as our first bugle call for moving towards the high-end market. Our mission is that one day customers can also recognize MediaTek as doing high-end flagship products. MT6592 is the first step, strictly speaking, it is not the most high-end platform, next we will move step by step towards the higher end.
Q: Why will MediaTek use eight small A7 cores as a generation of high-end platform, but did not choose to use four large A15 cores or four big and four small ones as a way to achieve the goal? This is also a question for the industry as there are many controversial issues with this.
For power, or performance per watt, we did a lot of investigation. Eight A7 cores is currently the best solution, and as through a process we designed to boost peak frequency of the A7 to 1.9-2Ghz, performance is also very strong.
Currently we chose a small core, because under the existing process, the larger the chip die size, the larger is the standby leakage, resulting in higher standby power consumption. For example, the A15 is the strongest core currently, but not in run-time power cosumption. Even if its frequency is pushed down to very low levels, there is still a larger leakage. Therefore, the larger is the area of a single-core, the larger is the overhead energy efficiency, and as long as the poweris on, there will be a greater leakage.
In addition, the 8-core CPU is just one aspect of improving the mobile multimedia experience. In fact, as we have been doing MediaTek digital TV for a long time, we will extend that digital TV competency here – some strong move for the smartphones. This is what other platform vendors can not do. In the 6592, for example, the latest HEVC codec will be integrated. [HEVC is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC]
…
Although our MT6592 GPU is also using a ‘Deluxe’ Mali quad-core GPU, but in order for content developers to achieve better compatibility, our HEVC is a software solution via the 8-core CPU, it is not using a GPU- based software solution. Because there are some strong content developers who will use their own HEVC decode. Currently the ‘Deluxe’ quad-core GPU on 6592 is mainly used to perform large-scale games and to do some advanced UI.
[Part 3] How to plan the future in the tablet market?
Q: I do note that the MT6592 is now using a quad-core Mali GPU, while before the MediaTek mainstream used Imagination GPU. How would you rate these two companies’ products?
The Imagination company has been doing GPUs long time in its history, the architecture design is beautiful, more artistic. The initial architecture of Mali [from ARM] would be more rough, and therefore area and power consumption will be worse. But after nearly three years of time, Mali has made a lot of progress, both are learning from each other, and by now the levels of these two are equal. The future perspective is that ARM’s overall resources are somewhat more fully available.
Q: This year we have seen MediaTek to attack the tablet market, what is the plan for the future in the tablet market?
A: Our current strategy is to carry out a mobile phone product line extension.
At the end of July the launch of a tablet chip is expected: the MT8135, with 2xA15 +2xA7, still using an Imagination GPU [Update: It is the PowerVR G6200 GPU (from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230) as you could see from Imagination block post published on the MT8135 announcement (July 29), and included here in front of the original post], and mainly targeting the high-end tablet market. A small reminder, our MT6572 is not suitable for tablet computers as the original definition did not take into account the application of flat-screen.
…
[Part 6] If Google Android OS will be converged how MediaTek will respond?
Q: There is also a very large concern, as the industry is worried that after doing their own hardware next year (e.g. Xphone, watches, glasses, etc.) whether Google will close the Android OS, i.e. to do a Pure Android later on, and don’t let OEMs to change it? MTK will also have a very big impact, what do you think? What is the MTK attitude on other free OS’s?
A: If Google OS will be closed and converged that will have a huge impact on us. But from what we observe and communicate with Google, they will not close the OS or converge it. Google’s profitability does not depend on OS, he is relying on the service for profit. By doing hardware Google also aims to promote his services, he is very happy to use someone else’s machine on their home services.
Of course, we will also be prepared, as we comprehesively examine and take into account the prevailing factors. We will use Windows as a second priority, while using Firefox [OS] and HTML5 as a secondary backup, by keeping track of them. Because we judge that the [Android] OS convergence from Google profitability point of view is very low, therefore our vote for these two emerging open OS’s is in the ‘not so urgent’ category, in addition to and outside of Android. The other focus is again on Windows Phone 8. For the moment, however, WP8 hardware configuration requirements are still higher (mainly memory), power consumption – after optimizing the gap with Android – is not too large.
…
News reports about MT6592 and its first application
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013]
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013]
Efficient video playback:
When on decoding mode, the battery used for decoding HEVC (H.265) FHD video
can be reduced by up to 18 percent compared to current quad-core solutions
(from MediaTek True Octa-Core Position Paper [MediaTek, July 23, 2013])
July 18 this information appeared on the English http://en.v5zn.com/ website of the related smartphone vendor as well: MediaTek MT6592’s first eight-core mobile phone exposure makes you believe [July 15, 2013] as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits
MediaTek so-called true eight-core processor MT6592 was announced not long ago, it is expected the first models equipped with processors to surface. It broke the news, that the domestic mobile phone manufacturer brand named after the 19th-century French writer Jules Verne [凡尔纳] has been determined to launch a flagship model “V8” quipped with the MT6592 processor.
Verne’s current main product is the “V5” model, equipped with a quad-core MediaTek MT6589, and a 5-inch 720p OGS full lamination screen, 1GB of RAM, 4GB storage, 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera, 2400 mAh Battery, with a list price of 999 yuan [$166].
V8 has not yet announced the exact configuration bit it is estimated to have about 5.5 inch 1080p screen, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, 13 million pixels Sony stacked camera, higher capacity battery, etc., without these natural shot himself embarrassed flagship.
It looks like that cooperation between MediaTek and the domestic Shanzhai vendors remains close. As MT6589 has rocked the Main Street, MT6592 will soon become a standard, and “an eight-core” promotion will be overwhelming.
Incidentally recap: MT6592 uses eight Cortex-A7 architecture cores, clocked at up to 2.0GHz, with TSMC 28nm manufacturing, Antutu run is known as close to 30,000, but the graphics core has not been confirmed,
PowerVR SGX 544MP4/554MP4 are likely[it will be Mali, as communicated by MediaTek, see above].The marketing of the processor has begun to customers, but mass production will be in November, so if recent high profile publicity is to be fulfilled, certainly we will have a large sale early next year.
Company introduction [Jules Verne mobile phone, January 16, 2013] as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits
Shenzhen MINDRAY Platinum Communication Technology Ltd. is is specialized in products development, production, sales and service of intelligent mobile terminals of high-tech companies. Under the “Jules Verne VOWNEY” brand the company is to create a mobile intelligent terminal brand.
MINDRAY Platinum company with “intelligent life” as the brand mission, is to “enhance the user experience, to help people grasp the development opportunities” as the goal, trying to make Jules Verne a trustworthy, continuous innovation and smart moves life guide. Every effort, just as long as you!
Jules Verne mobile phone network direct sales, stripping agents layers, increases direct benefits to consumers. We are committed to allow more consumers to have a better quality of life with an intelligent terminal.
The “Jules Verne VOWNEY ” brand aspires to be able to improve the quality of life for mobile users intelligent terminal INITIATIVE persons.
is to become quality of life can improve the user moves Smart The Terminal Guide. Lead you into “Slide 5.0”.
“Verne VOWNEY “brand aspires to be able to improve the quality of life for mobile users intelligent terminal INITIATIVE persons. I lead you into the “Slide 5.0″era.
Brand interpretation
Jules Verne: a derivative of intelligent life???
English explanation : VOWNEY
V : value— Value
O : opportunity— Opportunity
W : worth— It is worth
N : new— New
E : e— Mobile Internet
Y : you— YouJules Verne is to ” create a new life guided smart” as the goal, and strive to become a trusted, sustainable and innovative mobile phone brand, all efforts, just because of you!
Mediatek MT6592 8 core processors coming by the end of July! [Gizchina.com]
Reports out of Taiwan state that Mediatek will launch the MT6592 8-core processor by the end of July.
There was word that Mediatek were working on an 8 core chipset late last year, but like many we believed it had been placed on the back burner while they prepared their LTE chip. This seems to be wrong though as sources in Taiwan claim that Mediatek’s 8-core processor will arrive before the end of this month!
The MT6592 chip will be made up of 8 Cortex-A7, 28nm processor clocked at a frequency of up to 2Ghz! Early tests have the 8 core MT6592 scoring up to 30,000 points in Antutu which is more than Samsung’s 8 core Exynos 5410 processor.
The first batch of these new processors will be ready for manufacturers to begin development by the end of July, while Mediatek are preparing full-scale manufacture for November!
If everything goes to plan we can expect powerful 8 core phones from Tier 1 Chinese phone manufacturers by December!
MediaTek to launch true 8-core, 2GHz MT6592 chipset in November? [Engadget, July 2, 2013]
Samsung may already have its 8-core Exynos 5 Octa offering, but the original “big.LITTLE” implementation means only up to four cores work together at any time — either the Cortex-A15 quartet or its lesser Cortex-A7 counterpart. In other words, we’d rather rename the chipset range to something like “Exynos 5 Quad Dual.” But according to recent intel coming from Taipei and Shenzhen, it looks like Taiwan’s MediaTek is well on its way to ship a true 8-core mobile chipset in Q4 this year.
The first mention of this 2GHz, Cortex-A7 MT6592 chip came from UDN earlier today. The Taiwanese publication claims MediaTek started introducing its first octa-core product to clients last week, and it’s expected to enter mass production using TSMC’s 28nm process in November. The first mobile devices to carry this hot piece of silicon may hit the market in early 2014 — hopefully just in time for the Chinese New Year shopping rush.
UDN adds that the MT6592 scored close to 30,000 on AnTuTu, which is pretty high but still some distance behind Qualcomm’s 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800. Of course, chances are MediaTek’s offering will be much cheaper, as evidenced by all the affordable MediaTek-powered devices in China these days.
In a separate article from last week, UDN pointed out that judging by over a hundred job openings released by MediaTek last month, the company is clearly putting an emphasis on 4G LTE technology, alongside GPU and Android development. The publication also quoted chairman Tsai Ming-kai saying he will launch an LTE solution in Q4 this year, by which point MediaTek will only be one or two years behind its competitors.
The second piece of info came from HQ Research analyst Pan Jiutang, who posted an alleged spy shot of MediaTek’s upcoming roadmap (pictured left). There the octa-core MT6592 is listed with a clock speed of 1.7GHz to 2GHz, along with 1080p 30fps video decoding support. There’s also a quad-core 1.7GHz MT6588 accompanying its octa-core sibling in the same period on the timeline, though it appears to be just a faster version of the current 1.2GHz MT6589.
For the sake of phone manufacturers, both new chipsets will apparently be pin-to-pin compatible with the quad-core 1.3GHz MT6582 due Q3 this year, thus lowering R&D costs. Better yet, the roadmap also states that the MT6290 LTE modem — as teased by Tsai above — will be compatible with these three chipsets.
With MediaTek quickly catching up ahead of China’s eventual TD-LTE launch, Qualcomm will need to tread carefully to keep its Chinese QRD partners happy.
[Thanks, Ryan!]
Update: It’s worth noting that ARM’s eventual “big.LITTLE MP” implementation will allow all eight cores to run simultaneously, but the Exynos 5 Octa currently doesn’t support this. Thanks, UncleAlbert!
SOURCE: Sina Weibo (login required), UDN (1), (2)
What is new vs. my earlier
The state of big.LITTLE processing [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 7, 2013] report
Power scheduler design proposal [by Morten Rasmussen from ARM on Linux kernel mailing list, July 9, 2013]
This patch set is an initial prototype aiming at the overall power-aware scheduler design proposal that I previously described <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1508480>.
The patch set introduces a cpu capacity managing ‘power scheduler’ which lives by the side of the existing (process) scheduler. Its role is to monitor the system load and decide which cpus that should be available to the process scheduler. Long term the power scheduler is intended to replace the currently distributed uncoordinated power management policies and will interface a unified platform specific power driver obtain power topology information and handle idle and P-states. The power driver interface should be made flexible enough to support multiple platforms including Intel and ARM.
This prototype supports very simple task packing and adds cpufreq wrapper governor that allows the power scheduler to drive P-state selection. The prototype policy is absolutely untuned, but this will be addressed in the future. Scalability improvements, such as avoid iterating over all cpus, will also be addressed in the future.
Thanks,
Morten
From <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1508480>
…
+-----------------+ | | +----------+ current load | Power scheduler |<----+ cpufreq | +--------->| sched/power.c +---->| driver | | | | +----------+ | +-------+---------+ | ^ | +-----+---------+ | | | | | | available capacity | Scheduler |<--+----+ (e.g. cpu_power) | sched/fair.c | | | +--+| +---------------+ || ^ || | v| +---------+--------+ +----------+ | task load metric | | cpuidle | | arch/* | | driver | +------------------+ +----------+…
Linux Kernel News – June 2013 [by Shuah Khan in Linux Journal , July 9, 2013]
As always the Linux kernel community has been busy moving the Linux mainline to another finish line and the stable and extended releases to the next bump in their revisions to fix security and bug fixes. It is a steady and methodical evolution process which is intriguing to follow. Here is my take on the happenings in the Linux kernel world during June 2013.
Mainline Release (Linus’s tree) News
Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.10. You can read what Linus Torvalds had to say about this release in his release announcement athttp://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1306.3/04336.html
Two notable features in this release are improved SSD caching and better Radeon graphics driver Power Management.
…
Power efficient scheduling design
Ingo Molnar (Red Hat, x86 maintainer), Morten Rasmussen (ARM, power mgmt.), Priti Murthy (IBM, scheduler), Rafael Wysocki (Intel, Linux PM, and Linux ACPI maintainer) and Arjan van de Ven discussed the proposed power-aware or power-efficient scheduler design and what’s the best way to integrate it into the kernel.
Power management and the ability to balance performance and power efficiency is important and complex. It is not just about scheduler or cpus. It spans I/O devices that transition into lower-power states and how costly it is to bring them back to fully active state when needed. There is latency involved in these transitions. As always, Linux developers reach consensus to solve complex problems such as these and come up with path to get to the goal taking small steps towards that goal. Here is another example of that process at work.
Power-efficient scheduler work has been active for a few months now. Several RFC patches have been floated and discussed. This work is being pursued very actively in x86 space by IBM and in ARM space by ARM. The premise is that, if scheduler could pack tasks on a few cores and keep these cores fully utilized and, transition other cores to low power states, when the scheduling goal is power savings over performance. In other words, instead of keeping all the cores active, scheduler could consolidate tasks on a few cores and transition other cores to low-power states for better power efficiency.
It is easier said than done. Scheduler is at a higher level and would not be the best judge of making decisions on transitioning CPUs to idle states and deciding on the ideal frequency they should be running at. These decisions are better left to platform drivers that have the specific knowledge of the platform and architecture as they are complex and very hardware specific. In other words, power aware scheduler tuned to run well on x86 platforms will not work as well or could fail miserably on ARM platforms.
Scheduler has to accomplish load balancing as well as power balancing in a way to meet performance and power goals and do it well on all platforms. A generic scheduler doesn’t have to control and drive low-power state decisions on a platform. However, the goal of power-efficient scheduler is to set higher level abstracted policies that would work on all platforms. After a long and productive discussion, there is a consensus and here is the summary:
- A new kernel configuration option CONFIG_SCHED_POWER to enable/disable the power scheduler feature. Power scheduler is totally inactive, when CONFIG_SCHED_POWER is disabled, and fully active when CONFIG_SCHED_POWER is enabled. The important goal is evolving the power scheduler feature without disrupting and destabilizing the current scheduler.
- Work on a generic power scheduler with hardware and platform abstractions that will work well on big little ARM, x86, and other platforms. Avoid platform specific power policies that could lead to duplication of functionality in platform specific power drivers.
Please check the Linux Foundation site for presentations made at the Linux Collaboration Summit back in April 2013 on this topic. Here is the link to Jonathan Corbet’s blog on this topic.
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/715486-boosting……
From: big.LITTLE Software Update [by George Grey on Linaro Blog, July 10, 2013]
There are also two software models now available, that ARM and Linaro have developed to enable control of workloads, performance, and power management on big.LITTLE SoCs.
The first is the IKS [In Kernel Switcher, also known as CPU Migration]software, developed by Linaro, that treats each pair of Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 cores as a single ‘virtual’ core. On a multicore SoC each pair is treated as 1 of n virtual symmetric cores by the Linux kernel.
Core Software Configuration for IKS (4+4)
Using existing mechanisms in the Linux kernel for each pair the cpufreq driver controls whether the Cortex-A7 is active (for low power) or the Cortex-A15 is active (for maximum performance). Overall maximum performance and throughput on a 4+4 core SoC is from 4 Cortex-A15s. The key attribute of IKS is that it relies on existing well-understood mechanisms in the Linux kernel and it is easy to implement, test and characterize in a production environment.
The second is the Global Task Scheduling (GTS) [also known as big.LITTLE MP or Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP)] software developed (and now named) by ARM. This is known in Linaro as big.LITTLE MP. Using GTS all of the big and LITTLE cores are available to the Linux kernel for scheduling tasks. We are very proud that Linaro has contributed to ARM’s development of the GTS software, and that it is now publicly available in Linaro builds. ARM and Linaro recommend GTS for new products, and Linaro members are actively planning product deployments using this solution.
Core Software Configuration for GTS (4+4)
…
The big.LITTLE MP patch set creates a list of Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores that is used to pick the target core for a particular task. Then, using runnable load average statistics, the Linux scheduler is modified to track the average load of each task, and to migrate tasks to the best core. High intensity tasks are migrated to the Cortex-A15 core(s) and are also marked as high intensity tasks for more efficient future allocations. Low intensity tasks remain resident on the Cortex-A7 core(s).
IKS and GTS are now publicly available in Linaro monthly engineering releases for the ARM TC2 Versatile Express hardware, and in Linaro’s interim Long Term Supported Kernel (LSK) build. Both will also be incorporated into the first full Linaro LSK, which will be based on the next Linux Foundation, Greg Kroah-Hartman designated, Long Term Supported (LTS) kernel.
…
Until GTS functionality is fully upstream, ARM is supporting the big.LITTLE MP patch set for its licensees, leveraging Linaro’s public monthly and Linaro LSK builds, so that it is available to all ARM licensees for product integration and deployment. Linaro also expect to provide a topic branch for the latest work available on the upstream GTS implementation for interested developers.
… ARM and Linaro now recommend product development and deployment to be based on the GTS solution. However, there are some cases where hardware limitations or a requirement for the traditional Linux scheduler (for example in some embedded applications) may lead to IKS still being required.
Future Work
Power management software in Linaro is worked on by the Power Management Working Group. Other activities within the Group will enable additional power savings on ARM multi-core devices. One current project worth highlighting is the work being done by Vincent Guittot on small-task packing. Normally the Linux kernel will spread running tasks over all the available CPU cores. On a handset in standby, or even when being used with low activity, there may be a number of housekeeping and other small tasks that run in the background or relatively infrequently and therefore keep cores active unnecessarily. If “small” tasks can be migrated to one core, then the other cores could be made idle or even turned off completely, potentially resulting in significant power savings. This feature is expected to offer improved power management to systems based on symmetric multi-core SoCs (for example dual or quad-core Cortex-A7 or Cortex-A15 parts), as well as big.LITTLE SoCs.
While the current big.LITTLE efforts are focused on Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7, the techniques being implemented today for 32-bit systems are already being run on 64-bit models. We therefore expect to see the GTS software running on 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 based big.LITTLE SoCs as soon as they become available.
Real Life Results
ARM has published further information on big.LITTLE configurations and performance in a blog entry here [Ten Things to Know About big.LITTLE [Brian Jeff on SoC Design blog of ARM, June 18, 2013]].
The first commercial products based on big.LITTLE are certain international versions of the latest Galaxy S4 phone from Linaro member, Samsung. Samsung-LSI provide an ‘Octa-core’ 4+4 big.LITTLE chip for this phone. As has been publicly noted, the current generation of hardware cannot yet take full advantage of the IKS or the GTS designs because the hardware power-saving core switching feature is implemented on a cluster basis rather than on a per-core or a per-pair basis. Even so, the first big.LITTLE implementation produces performance and power consumption on a par with the latest Qualcomm multi-core Snapdragon processor according to reviews from Engadget, PocketNow and others. Often first implementations of new technology never see the light of day – it is a tribute to Samsung’s engineers that the Exynos 5 is already seeing the Cortex-A15 level of performance with the power saving of the Cortex-A7s in a mass market handset in the very first big.LITTLE iteration.
We look forward to seeing what improvements full use of GTS will bring when used on future production devices from Samsung and others.
More information: Power Management with big.LITTLE: A technical overview [by Steven Willis in SoC blog of ARM, June 20, 2013]
Why all this sudden attention on the Linux Scheduler? [LCE13, Linaro Connect Europe]
12:00 PM – 13:00 PM on Monday, Jul 8, 2013 (IST)
Description
The Linux scheduler is getting a lot of attention in the ARM ecosystem these days. Come to this discussion to find out why.
Several people working on the scheduler or interested in changes to the scheduler will be invited to talk about their requirements, what is the state of their work, who will benefit from it, etc.
Minutes of the above discussion
Determinism: problems
———————* Preemption: interrupts, locking
* Latency
* Scheduling overhead
* Realtime processingMost of the requirements are coming from LEG/LNG.
Solutions:
– PREEMPT_RT
– Adaptive NO_HZ (merged in 3.10)Came out of high-performance computing. When there is just one
task, the scheduler is switched off for that CPU. Results in
zero scheduler overhead. When the only task finishes – the CPU
will get into scheduling/idle again.There is still once-per-second tick for scheduling. There
is a patch removing that last remaining bit to make it fully
tickless.We’re not sure yet if all the possible limitations are found –
there still might be some scheduler overhead left.
If interrupt handling is offloaded to other cores, caching
related issues will still affect performance (e.g. serving IO
interrupts for the task on a different core will require the
dedicated core to cache the date once again).– Deadline
Physical process isolation: none addresses
– Needed for KVM.
Temporal isolation: all three (with some limitations)
No scheduling overhead: ADAPTIVE NO_HZ only.
Firm/Hard Real-time PREEMPT_RT only
Complexity:
high for PREEMPT_RT
low for the restRequirements:
all of the abovePower efficiency: history
————————-
* sched-mc (got removed)
* big.LITTLE MP patches implementing GTS (ARM)
* Packing Small Tasks (Linaro/ARM)
Pack all small background tasks on as little number of small cores
as possible to conserve power.Intel approach does not care about which core is selected as the
best one (Turbo Mode is effectively converting the core into a BIG
core, while all the other cores are becoming little ones). Task
migration is expensive – this approach helps avoiding it.* Power aware scheduling (Intel)
Discussions were lasting for a while and then Ingo Molnar requested
an integral solution (not a set of independent bits).He made a good point. What we have an SMP legacy implementation.
Are we starting from scratch because of that?
It is going to be a significal change. We need to re-think as it’s
not SMP case anymore. b.L is not a new architecture – Intel already
does that but differently.The task is to find the most efficient way of performing the work
needed. The best place to make those decisions is the scheduler.Power officiency – proposal (from ARM)
————————————–Separate process and power scheduler (ARM). This is the first step
to get to the fully integral scheduler in the future. Helps fighting
with the complexity at hand. In this case there are certain
limitations – one of the schedulers will be leading while the second
one will be limited.That doesn’t work well for Intel CPUs (no pre-configured small/BIG
cores).Issues:
– Topology
Missing:
– Frequency domains, which CPUs are affected. That would be
useful for the scheduler.– Idle + DVFS
Missing:
– information about the cost of using a certain core at certain
DVFS operation point to perform a certain amount of work.– Thermal
The idea is to keep an eye on the temperature trend to avoid
cases when whole cores are needed to be temporarily shut down to
cool them down.GPU contribution into the thermal budget should also be
considered.Trying to control DVFS from the scheduler. Patches are expected very
soon.Q: How much of the improvements are we looking for (power wise)?
A: Something that will get upstream. 😀
Linux 3.10 [by Linus Torvalds on Linux kernel mailing list, June 30, 2013]
Linux kernel 3.10 arrives with ARM big.LITTLE support [Engadget, July 1, 2013]
Thanks to Linus Torvalds’ figurative stroke of the pen, the Linux kernel 3.10 is now final — paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second — rather than 1,000 times — when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM supportby including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types — commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 — that focus on either power savings or performance. The full list of improvements is rather lengthy, but if you feel like nerding out with the changelog, just grab a caffeinated beverage and get to it.
Linaro 13.06 Released! [by Amber Graner on Linaro Blog, June 27, 2013]
The Linaro 13.06 release is now available for download!
…
It’s been a very active cycle for the Builds and Baselines team, reporting that the Continuous Integration (CI) loop for the Linaro Stable Kernel (LSK) Android proof of concept which is based on 3.9.6 kernel version was set up and includes the big.LITTLE IKS and MP patches (also called beta patchset). Support for Kernel CI loop with Android filesystem was added to android-build and CI loop was set up to track the ARM Landing Team (LT) integration tree. The HiSilicon member build with complete CI loop was set up and now tracks the LT kernel tree.
…