This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

Qualcomm Centriq

Update: A typo in this article suggested pure-play foundry 10nm is a friction match for Intel'due south 10nm. The correct comparison (in terms of feature sizes) is 10nm at TSMC/Samsung and 14nm at Intel. ET regrets the fault.

Over the past six years, Intel has adroitly retaken and defended its information center business organisation from all challengers. AMD was never able to win meaning share for its Bulldozer and Piledriver families, and while companies similar Calxeda intended to challenge Intel in high-density servers, such battles never materialized. AMD's Epyc servers may accept market share from Intel over the longer term, but AMD has repeatedly said that information technology's ramping Epyc slowly through the end of 2022.

That just leaves Qualcomm, but that "merely" may need to be in quotation marks. Early benchmarks on Qualcomm's Centriq server CPUs (codenamed Falkor) by Cloudflare show the Qualcomm chips offering potent competition for Intel. The information in question comes from a blog post published by Cloudflare. I absolutely recommend giving information technology a read for the total details of what we're going to hash out, but we'll call out some salient results. First off, here'southward how the iii cores compare:

Core-Comparison

On paper, they're pretty similar. Qualcomm's expertise at building small cores clearly comes in handy on the TDP front, allowing it stack 46 cores in a package at a lower TDP than we've seen from Intel or AMD. The difference in nodes (Intel'south 14nm versus Qualcomm's 10nm) shouldn't actually thing; the 10nm process node deployed at the pure-play foundries is believed to be a crude match for Intel's ain 14nm. Cloudflare puts the 3 fries head to head in a variety of benchmarks, including OpenSSL, pinch tests, Golang (Go crypto, gzip, regexp, strings), LuaJIT, and NGINX.

Since we don't desire to pull all of Cloudflare'south results, we've settled on ii tests that illustrate overall performance standings: Single-threaded tests (LuaJIT) and multi-threaded tests (gzip).

luajit_1_core

Benchmarks and graphs by Cloudflare

In LuaJIT, the Intel chips win single-threaded performance comparisons, hands downward. This reflects Skylake and Broadwell'due south overall single-thread performance in the benchmarks Cloudflare ran — the Intel chips are at their strongest here, thanks to higher innate single-threaded perf and college target clocks. If you're doing lightly threaded work, Intel may well be the decisive leader (though we'd enquire why yous're buying a x-12 cadre CPU in the commencement place).

gzip_all_core

In multi-threading workloads, the Qualcomm Cintriq often whacks Intel upside the head. This is, again, not particularly surprising. Intel's own data suggests that while information technology has a significant clock advantage in single-threaded, where its CPUs can outburst upwardly to 3GHz+, it's total-cadre maximum is well below Qualcomm, at ii.1Ghz versus 2.5GHz. And while the Intel chips have Hyper-Threading, which helps, it's never been the same as having a full second cadre. Hyper-Threading would typically be expected to improve performance by 20-thirty percentage, which leaves Cloudflare's Qualcomm system with a significant core advantage.

Higher core counts accept a strength of their own, as seen consumer-side when AMD'southward Threadripper took on Intel'south equivalently priced Core i9-7900X. The 7900X might offer higher per-core functioning in many tests, but 16 cores versus x means that even applications that favor Intel intrinsically tin even so wind up as wins for AMD.

Why Intel Should Be Worried

Up until now, Intel has faced two lightweight opponents: AMD, which is only just reentering the server market with no near-term expectation of seizing huge amounts of market place share (Lisa Su has stated that the firm volition slowly ramp server sales through the stop of 2022); and smaller ARM manufacturers who might compete in dense server applications, simply haven't brought the fight to Intel's cadre markets. As the Cloudflare article notes, at that place are a lot of gears that have to mesh properly for an ARM vendor to have on the x86 hegemony, from proper software optimizations to RAS characteristic support. Server vendors are conservative. Companies buying servers are bourgeois. That's why AMD has planned a slow ramp into the market place, and information technology'southward why we don't expect to see Cintriq hoovering up a huge per centum of sales its first year out the door. We as well don't know how much the Cintriq systems toll, or how information technology performs in other types of workloads.

But while these numbers aren't a knockout accident, Chipzilla will be paying serious attention however. Data centers, AI, deject, and motorcar learning workloads are all critical to Intel'due south time to come, and the x86 manufacturer isn't going to sacrifice ground to Qualcomm (or AMD) without a furious fight. Hat-tip to Tech Report for finding this story.