Qualcomm is moving to server market as the company has unveiled its new Server Development Platform (SDP), a platform based on a 24-core ARMv8-A SoC.

Aimed at "hyperscale data center customers", infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, big data, and machine-learning workloads, the new Qualcomm 24-core prototype chip is based on a FinFET manufacturing process and feature server class PCIe and storage connectivity.

During it press event, Qualcomm demonstrated the new SDP on a KVM Linux hypervisor, OpenStack DevStack, and guest Linux distributions running Apache and WordPress. According to Qualcomm, the commercial version of the SDP will use a fully-custom core, also based on a FinFET manufacturing process and featuring even more cores.

Qualcomm has teamed up with both Xilinx and Mellanox Technologies, where Xilinx's FPGA technology will be combined with upcoming Qualcomm SDP in order to make it suitable for applications in compute acceleration, big data analytics, machine learning, storage, and CloudRAN. Mellanox Technologies, will provide Ethernet and Infiniband connectivity which will be compatible with Qualcomm's new ARM-based server SoC.

Unfortunately, Qualcomm did not provide any more details regarding its server SoC since we are still looking at a prototype chip that is currently sampled to big customers for testing purposes and the next big update is expected next year.



Source: Qualcomm.com.