| Centriq | |
| Produced-Start: | 2017 |
| Soldby: | Qualcomm |
| Designfirm: | Qualcomm |
| Manuf1: | Samsung[1] |
| Core1: | Falkor |
| Instructions: | ARMv8-A |
| Numcores: | up to 48 |
Centriq ([2]) is a brand of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products designed and marketed by Qualcomm for data centers. The Centriq central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set, with multiple CPU cores in a single chip.
In November 2014, Qualcomm announced it was developing an ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture based CPU that was purpose-built for data centers.[3] In December 2016, the company announced and demonstrated the first multi-core CPUs based on a custom ARM ARMv8-A microarchitecture.
The first Centriq 2400 series of products were made available to server manufacturers in November 2017. With these first products, Qualcomm introduced its "Falkor" ARMv8-A microarchitecture. The chip has up to 48 of Qualcomm's custom designed "Falkor" cores at up to 2.6GHz, with six-channel DDR4 memory and a 60 MB L3 cache.[4] [5]
A number of reviews have noted at its release that the Centriq is expected to face significant competition from established x86-64 data-center CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD, and ARM microarchitecture server products such as Cavium's ThunderX2.[6] [7] In addition to competitive pressures, it has been noted that running established workloads on ARM microarchitectures requires re-optimizing and recompiling the software, or x86-64 emulation, presenting a barrier to entry for some potential customers.