Cavium opens up with Microsoft

The contribution enables the adoption and iteration by members of OCP, a global community of technology leaders who are reimagining hardware to make it more efficient, flexible, and scalable.

The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium's second generation 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor SoCs for Data Center, Cloud and High-Performance Computing applications. The family integrates fully out-of-order high performance custom cores supporting single and dual socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple workload optimized SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as ARM's SBSA and SBBR standards. It is also widely supported by industry leading OS, Hypervisor and SW tool and application vendors.

Cavium and Microsoft originally announced their collaboration at the OCP U.S. Summit in March 2017, where the two companies demonstrated cloud service workloads developed for Microsoft’s internal use running on ThunderX2 based server platform.  During theDCD: Zettastructuresummit today, the companies releasedthe detailed specificationof ThunderX2 Server Motherboard for Microsoft’s Project Olympus including block diagram, management sub-system, power management, FPGA Card support, IO connectors, and physical specifications.

“Cavium is pleased to collaborate with Microsoft on contributing world’s first dual socket ARM server mother board design to the Open Compute Project,” said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM, Data Center Processor Group at Cavium. “ThunderX2 delivers best-in-class compute, memory and IO performance to most demanding Data Center workloads and this contribution will enable interested server OEMs and ODMs to quickly design and proliferate ThunderX2 based Project Olympus platforms.”

Kushagra Vaid, GM, Azure Hardware Infrastructure, Microsoft Corp. said, “We designed Microsoft’s Project Olympus with the ability to accommodate a variety of workloads and processor architectures. We’ve been closely collaborating with Cavium to integrate ThunderX2 into Microsoft’s Project Olympus design, and to drive innovation within the ARM ecosystem especially for workloads that benefit from high-throughput computing. The completion and contribution of our Project Olympus specification shows our continued commitment to the Open Compute Project and community developed innovation.”