Qualcomm has started to sample a new 24-core ARM processor aimed for use in servers and data centres, the company has revealed. The new chip in question is a pre-production system on chip (SoC) based on the ARMv8-A instruction set, which will be purposed for tackling common data centre workloads and machine learning. Testing began on Thursday this week.

The demo on Thursday took place as part of Qualcomm's Server Development Platform, which has been in the making for a couple of years. The new 24-core ARM SoC is custom-built using advanced FinFet technology. The demo that took place tested the chip running the entire software stack, according to The Inquirer's report, including: Linux kernel version 4.2 along with KVM virtualisation, OpenStack DevStack for OpenStack cloud orchestration, guest virtual machines running a standard Linux distribution along with Apache web server and WordPress.”

Qualcomm's Senior Vice President, Anand Chandrasekher, explained its latest venture in a press release: “As data centres evolve to support the exponential growth and innovation in data, connectivity and cloud services, Qualcomm is creating an ecosystem to meet the needs of these next-generation data centres with Qualcomm-based server technologies”.

“Our customers are eager to test and evaluate our SDP and begin porting their software. We are incorporating their feedback into our product with the goal of ensuring system and software readiness by the time we are in full production.”

KitGuru Says: Qualcomm's processors have gained in popularity over the last few years. This new SoC is clearly quite advanced, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against similar offerings on the market. 

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