For at least four years, Arm has been striving to become an essential component of modern servers and data centers, playing a significant role in cloud computing. However, during the same four years, Arm has been working to create higher-performance cores to compete with x86 in single-threaded workloads. The core is called Ares, which is set to be released in 2019. Although Arm has not officially disclosed specific technical details, Huawei has announced that its center has hardware featuring Ares cores.
AnandTech has revealed a set of specifications for Huawei’s fourth-generation self-developed ARM server chip, the Hi1620. The new Hi1620 is announced as the world’s first 7nm processor for data centers, with the Ares core bringing high performance to its deployment.
The Hi1620 serves Huawei’s high-performance platform codenamed “Taishan”, based on the ARM v8.2 architecture, configurable from 24 to 64 cores in a single socket, with each core configured with 512KB of L2 cache and 1MB of L3 cache, operating at frequencies ranging from 2.4 to 3.0GHz. Each of these cores has a 64KB L1 data cache and a 64KB L1 instruction cache, with each core having a dedicated 512KB L2 cache. The L3 cache will operate with 1MB per core, reaching a maximum of 64MB. Compared to consumer Skylake cores, this means more L2 cache per core but less L3. However, there are no correlations mentioned. One key issue is performance: many vendors hope to have Arm cores with Skylake-level raw performance.
In terms of storage and I/O, it supports 8-channel DDR4-3200 memory and 40 PCIe 4.0 lanes, which is fewer than the 46 lanes on the Hi1616. The Hi1620 will also support CCIX, dual 100GbE MACs, some USB 3.0, and some SAS connections.
It is likely that the number of transistors has increased significantly; even with the 7nm process, the Hi1620 chip’s BGA package size has reached 60×75 mm, larger than the previous generation’s 16nm Hi1616, which measured 57.5×57.5 mm.
The power consumption range is 100 to 200W, likely corresponding to 100W for 24 cores and 200W for 64 cores.
