“Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last several years, you’ve undoubtedly come to know and understand the on-going shift in the datacenter industry to a cloud-based computing model. Cloud-based software has become the basis of much of our mobile experience today, with services like ride-sharing or social media that are only viable — or greatly enhanced — with the significant compute resources running in a datacenter.
Such mobile services, along with the wide variety of cloud services beyond those associated with the mobile world, have demanded a shift in software architecture to scale with a large number of systems and today’s more powerful, multi-threaded processors. Workloads that traditionally have run on an enterprise’s own compute infrastructure are moving to a public cloud computing model, taking advantage of the economics of scale that such consolidation brings.
This shift from the private datacenter infrastructure to cloud computing services continues to accelerate. According to a recent IDC Cloud Server Forecast, more than 50 percent of servers sold by 2020 will be deployed for cloud computing services. And the processors that power those servers need to be optimized to address the demand for scalable performance under the unique characteristics of cloud software and services.
Five years ago, as we at Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies began to map out our strategy to enter the datacenter market, we recognized the then-nascent trend to cloud computing and designed a technology roadmap with cloud computing in mind. The cornerstone design point for our datacenter server product roadmap was to deliver right-sized solutions, optimizing throughput performance and efficiency for emerging multi-core cloud workloads. Cloud services need to perform well in highly-loaded and multi-tenant environments, and the hardware platform needs to maximize aggregate compute performance while improving the cloud operator’s operational costs, largely driven by the cost of power and cooling.”