Phytium's 64-core ARM chip

Our sister site The Next Platform has just published loads of interesting details on 64-bit ARMv8-compatible desktop, laptop and server processors designed by Chinese upstart Phytium.

The first engineering samples for three 28nm CPUs – the Earth architecture FT-1500A/4 and the FT-1500A/16 and the Mars architecture FT-2000/64 – are back from TSMC's fab and were seen running Kylin Linux at California's Hot Chips conference last week. China's Google Baidu is among organizations testing them. We're probably going to see this in volume production in the final quarter of the year, or shortly after.

Here's the basic stats:

• The FT-1500A/4 has four Xiaomi cores running between 1.5 and 2GHz, with a 2MB L2 cache spread across the cores and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and builtin 1GbE controller, two DDR3 controllers and a PCIe 3 controller. It's aimed at PCs and light servers, and consumes 15W.
• The The FT-1500A/16 has 16 Xiaomi cores, with an 8MB L2 cache spread across the cores and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and two builtin 1GbE controllers, four DDR3 controllers and a PCIe 3 controller. It's aimed at PCs and light servers, and consumes 35W.
• The FT-2000/64 is a 100W chip with 64 Xiaomi cores, 512KB L2 cache per core, and a 128MB L3 cache, plus 16 DDR3 memory controllers.

"Phytium said that Mars chip with 64 cores running at 2GHz was able hit 570 on the integer and 482 on the floating point parts of the SPEC_CPU20006_rate test. That is a 15.2 per cent hit on expected integer performance and a 17.6 per cent decline on expected floating point performance," TNP's Timothy Prickett Morgan reports.

Check out The Next Platform for the full story. ®