Applied Micro CEO and president Paramesh Gopi recently confirmed that PayPal has “deployed and validated” the ARM-powered X-Gene server-on-a-chip.
According to Gopi, Paypal represents one of the many hyperscale data center customers the company is currently engaged with to drive X-Gene adoption.
“The X-Gene equipped units cost approximately one-half the price of traditional data center infrastructure hardware and incurred only one-seventh of the annual running cost,” Gopi told journalists and analysts during an earnings call.
“Even with these dramatically favorable capital and operating expense reductions, the X-Gene equipped systems delivered performance equivalent to the incumbent infrastructure.”
These advantages, says Gopi, enable PayPal to use scale-out computing and achieve an order of magnitude improvement in compute density.
“PayPal’s real world results unequivocally prove X-Gene’s value proposition and illustrate why we are optimistic about X-Gene deployments,” he added.
Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, describes AppliedMicro’s X-Gene as an SoC solution that combines 10/40Gbps mixed signal I/O with eight (8) 64-bit ARMv8 cores running at up to 2.4GHz with an enterprise-class memory subsystem.
“AppliedMicro’s goal with X-Gene is to marry server-class thread level performance and feature set with mobile-pedigree power savings capability,” Moorhead wrote in a recent white paper.
One of the key advantages of the X-Gene based m400 is the doubling of addressable memory to 64GB per cartridge.
“[This] significantly higher memory bandwidth [is] made possible by X-Gene’s four memory channels (two DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMMs per channel for a total of eight x 8GB DIMMs per cartridge),” said Moorhead.
As we’ve previously discussed, AppliedMicro is already sampling the X-Gene2, which offers support for both DDR3 and DDR4.
“Based on the 2014 HotChips presentation, we know that the X-Gene2 maintains four channels of memory,” Loren Shalinsky, a Strategic Development Director at Rambus, explained. “It also seems as if multiple SKUs will be offered – ranging from 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz, and from 8 to 16 cores. I would expect that as companies push their way up in performance, they will want to migrate to the higher performance provided by DDR4.”
It should be noted that DDR4 memory delivers a 40-50 percent increase in bandwidth, along with a 35 percent reduction in power consumption compared to DDR3 memory (currently in servers). In addition, internal data transfers are faster with DDR4, while in-memory applications such as databases – where a significant amount of processing takes place in DRAM – are expected to benefit as well.
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