Arm Puts Some Muscle Into Future Neoverse Server CPU Designs

The Next Platform ^ | April 27, 2021 | Timothy Prickett Morgan

[SunkenCiv]

Last September, when Arm trotted out the Neoverse V1 design and made it available, the N2 design was not yet available. But as of this announcement, today, it is. Both the Ampere Computing Altra and the Amazon Web Services Graviton2 processors, which are the two production-grade Arm server chips in the market today, are based on N1 cores and platform designs, with various customizations...

With the V1 platform, Arm is designing cores and the uncore regions of a hypothetical processor using either 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer processes, presumably either at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp or Samsung Electronics, which have fabs that can handle either. Intel, which has merchant foundry aspirations, could eventually get there. As could SMIC, the Chinese foundry, which launched its 7 nanometer efforts last fall... And 5 nanometer is going to be for the elite only. We shall see just how real 3 nanometer processes are...

While the V1 design is aimed at CPUs with 32 to 128 cores with a thermal envelope of between 80 watts and 350 watts, the N2 cores are aimed at mainstream infrastructure servers that might have 12 to 36 cores and run at between 30 watts and 80 watts. That is not to say that there will not be N2 chips that don’t push the core limits up and down – there will be some, at we think Ampere Computing, AWS, and possibly Nvidia will use N2 cores in some devices...

The N2 is really an upgrade to the N1, with 40 percent higher IPC at constant frequency, with around the same power draw and about the same area as the N1 but allowing a 10 percent increase in clock speed and presumably more cores and caches thanks to the shrink to 5 nanometers...

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

Armv9 heralds the next-generation of smartphone CPUs
Robert Triggs
March 30, 2021
https://www.androidauthority.com/armv9-explained-1213065/

and, for those who can stand to listen to this:

128 Core Armv9 Processors are Coming - Arm Neoverse N2
Gary Explains
April 27, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXUgQCRNPVA

[Nateman]

The width of a silicon atom is about .2 nanometers. The article mentions 3 nanometer architecture. That is only 15 silicon atoms across.

Obviously this technology is about to reach its endpoint.

[minnesota_bound]

I was looking into putting together a new pc after 6 years from the last time I did.
Prices for cpu’s and motherboards have gone way up.
I figure $1,000 just for the cpu and motherboard to start.

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor $614
The AMD-Ryzen 7 5800X 4th Gen 8-core Desktop Processor Without Cooler, 16-Threads Unlocked $447

I will wait as my pc is not really slow at all.
If yours is then add more ram and get a SSD drive.

[SunkenCiv]

Moore’s Law is more a guideline than a rule, although it is a little conservative on average.

https://www.google.com/search?q=silicon+3-D+lithography

[SunkenCiv]

Windows 10 peecees have become throwaway (the last two have cost me less than $500 combined), the only reason to build one from scratch is for gaming (or as a hobby).