IDT, Cavium Get Together on Reference Design for Hyperscale Data Centers

The data center is increasingly an important part of business operations, serving everything from cloud-based systems to customer-facing tools and beyond. So keeping the data center running at its peak is just as vital, and represents the focus of an ambitious new team-up for Integrated Device Technology (IDT) and Cavium as the duo got together to drive the hyperscale data center.

The co-production brings together IDT's DDR4 memory interface tools with Cavium's ThunderX 64-bit ARMv8 processors to produce a new reference design geared toward taking a load off the hyperscale data center, which has a lot on its plate already. The combined solution is said to be energy-efficient, and is geared toward members of the Open Compute Project, though other hyperscale data center operators will be able to get in as well.

Using ThunderX chips allows the data center to be ready for today's cloud applications as well as tomorrow's, offering custom cores, multiple socket configurations, built-in hardware acceleration systems, and a low-latency Ethernet fabric. Meanwhile, the IDT DDR4 chipset contributes data buffers and thermal sensors, allowing several lines of dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) to run effectively and provide a lot of the backbone for increasingly powerful servers.

IDT's Rami Sethi, the vice president and general manager of memory interface products, commented “IDT is excited to work with partners like Cavium and industry bodies like the Open Compute Project to demonstrate the compelling value of our DDR4 chipset in hyperscale data centers. Our solution uniquely enables users to scale memory capacity without compromising data rates in order to maximize workload performance and efficiency.” Cavium's data center processor director Rishi Chugh noted that its relationship with IDT was “the obvious choice,” and allowed for “...workload-optimized, flexible, scalable and efficient ARM-based server solutions to the data center market, including the growing community of the OCP .”

Data centers are the driving force behind a host of new developments. Whether it's big data use, cloud-based call centers, or any of dozens of other uses, businesses increasingly turn to data centers to provide the backbone for these activities. That means the data center needs to be running at its full capacity to get the most out of it, and that's where Cavium and IDT's new joint operation offers its fullest value. While in many cases we can address lack of capacity by adding more, this can have negative impact in terms of power consumption and the like. With Cavium and IDT offering essentially more capacity for less power use, it's not surprising to see more businesses want to bring in such a solution.

Cavium and IDT may well have hit on a market-beating way to provide hyperscale data center services, and this blend of high power and reduced power consumption may well drive a lot of data centers to consider the combined system for their backbones.

Edited by Maurice Nagle