Qualcomm Centriq

Centriq (/sɛnˈtriːk/ sen-TREEK^[2]) is a brand of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products designed and marketed by Qualcomm for data centers. The Centriq central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set, with multiple CPU cores in a single chip.

Centriq

General information
Launched	2017
Marketed by	Qualcomm
Designed by	Qualcomm
Common manufacturer	Samsung[1]
Architecture and classification
Instructions	ARMv8-A
Physical specifications
Cores	up to 48
Products, models, variants
Core name	Falkor

History

Pre-release

In November 2014, Qualcomm announced it was developing an ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture based CPU that was purpose-built for data centers.^[3] In December 2016, the company announced and demonstrated the first multi-core CPUs based on a custom ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture.

Early products

The first Centriq 2400 series of products were made available to server manufacturers in November 2017.^[1] With these first products, Qualcomm introduced its "Falkor" ARMv8-A microarchitecture. The chip has up to 48 of Qualcomm's custom designed "Falkor" cores at up to 2.6GHz, with six-channel DDR4 memory and a 60 MB L3 cache.^[4][5]

Market environment

A number of reviews have noted at its release that the Centriq is expected to face significant competition from established x86-64 data-center CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD, and ARM microarchitecture server products such as Cavium's ThunderX2.^[6][7] In addition to competitive pressures, it has been noted that running established workloads on ARM microarchitectures requires re-optimizing and recompiling the software, or x86-64 emulation, presenting a barrier to entry for some potential customers.