Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons
by gpderetta on Thursday June 02, 2016 @08:36AM
(#11821944)
"Proprietary blobs such as Intel's ME that cannot be removed from Intel Xeon systems pose a security risk. If the ARM systems are found to lack them and they achieve the status of being good enough, security minded individuals and organizations will buy them because of that."
Do you expect the above to be anything more than a rounding error of the total server market? I doubt Cavium is going to finance its development from that.
Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons
by nitrogen on Thursday June 02, 2016 @03:36PM
(#11825408)
If you want it to be so, then make it so. There's plenty of ammunition to use in all of the leaks.
Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons
by redtuesday on Thursday June 02, 2016 @06:09PM
(#11826507)
> ThunderX2 is a 14nm FinFET design, and the company claims it will deliver 2 to 3 times the performance of ThunderX on select workloads with a higher performance to power ratio. Their plan for the X2 is to include 54 ARMv8.2 cores with a target frequency of 2.4 to 2.8 GHz and up to 3 GHz in turbo mode (versus their current 28nm, 48 core, 2.5GHz design), 32MB of what Cavium calls shared Last Level Cache (LLC), 6 DDR4 memory interfaces running at 3200MHz (1 DPC) or 2966MHz (2 DPC), multiple 10/25/40/100 Gb/s Ethernet (KR) interfaces, enhanced virtualization support (including IO), ARM Holdings Trustzone security and a variety of hardware accelerators. [...] [1]
Is ARM's TrustZone not the same as Intel's ME? At least I remember that AMD uses a ARM Core with TrustZone in it's x86 CPU's to basically achieve the same (or something similar) as Intel's Management Engine.
[1] quoted from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/05/30/cavium-s...
TrustZone is basically the name for the ring -1/hypervisor access level for ARM CPUs, not a separate "engine" or product. It can be used to run and isolate code at a higher privilege level than an operating system eg. for DRM.
Proprietary blobs such as Intel's ME that cannot be removed from Intel Xeon systems pose a security risk. If the ARM systems are found to lack them and they achieve the status of being good enough, security minded individuals and organizations will buy them because of that.
As long as that happens, Cavium will be able to use the revenues to develop the next generation of chips to better compete on traditional metrics like Intel was able to do against the RISC vendors of the past. As a security minded individual myself, I am well aware of that and I look forward to supporting such developments by purchasing such hardware for applications where it can be used.
There are others thinking this too. Some of them are watching the Talos workstation motherboard come to market with that in mind. The people behind it are even talking about IBM's executives being willing to make the POWER9 processor's microcode open source if the POWER8 model succeeds.
https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php