Qualcomm Incorporated   through its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., today made significant progress in its move to offer world-class server processors with a live demonstration of its Server Development Platform (SDP), which is now sampling to tier-one data centers. The system includes a pre-production version of 24-core System-on a-chip (SoC) based on the ARMv8-A instruction set. In two separate announcements, the company also disclosed technology collaborations with both Xilinx and Mellanox.
 
“The release of our evaluation system is a major milestone for Qualcomm Technologies. As data centers evolve to support the exponential growth and innovation in data, connectivity and cloud services, Qualcomm Technologies is creating an ecosystem to meet the needs of these next-generation data centers with Qualcomm-based server technologies,” says Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Our customers are eager to test and evaluate our Server Development Platform and begin porting their software. We are incorporating their feedback into our product offering with the goal of ensuring system and software readiness by the time we are in full production.”
 
Targeted at hyperscale data center customers, Qualcomm Technologies’ server SoC technology is designed to tackle some of the most common data center workloads, including Infrastructure as-a Service (IaaS), Platform as-a Service (PaaS), big data and machine learning. In development for more than two years, the SDP includes a custom server-class 24-core SoC built using advanced FinFet technology. It integrates all of the standard server-class features including PCIe and storage. The first in a roadmap of production single-chip server SoCs will include a fully custom core built on FinFet technology and will be one of the most advanced server-class SoCs on the market.
 
The SDP was tested today running the entire software stack: Linux kernel version 4.2 along with KVM virtualization, OpenStack DevStack for OpenStack cloud orchestration, guest virtual machines running a standard Linux distribution along with Apache web server and WordPress.