Revision as of 16:21, 13 October 2017

Falkor is an ARM microarchitecture designed by Qualcomm for the server market. Falkor-based microprocessors are manufactured on a 10 nm process and sold under the Centriq brand.

Process Technology

Further information: 10 nm lithography process

Falkor-based chips are manufactured on TSMC's 10 nm process.

Architecture

Falkor is a new architecture designed by Qualcomm from the ground up for the server market. While some of the core architecture ressmbles Qualcomm's mobile cores, the overall system architecture is considerably different to anything Qualcomm has previously designed.

Overview

• Core
  • 1 V nominal operating voltage
  • 64-bit ARM
    • AArch64 only
      • Fully ARMv8-compliant
    • Supports EL3 (TrustZone)
    • Supports EL2 (hypervisor)
    • Supports AES, SHA1, SHA2-256 optional cryptography instructions
  • Out-of-order Pipeline
    • 4-way Decode
      • 3 instructions + 1 direct branch per cycle
    • 8-way Scheduler
    • 256-entry ReOrder Buffer
    • 76-entry Scheduler
    • 4 instructions/cycle retirement
    • 16B load + 16B store per cycle
• Core Duplex
  • 2 cores in a duplex
    • Shared L2 per duplex

Block Diagram

System Overview

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Individual Core

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Memory Hierarchy

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Overview

The chip has been designed by Qualcomm specifically for the data center. Specifically this architecture is an attempt to address high concurrency, high thread density while maintaining isolation and quality of service between the processes. The overall chip consists of 24 core duplexes incorporating 48 cores on a ring interconnect along with 6 channels of DDR4 and L3 cache distributed across the ring. The chip also integrates 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 8 SATA gen 3.0 lanes, and a mixture of various other I/O peripherals.

System Architecture

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Core

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References

• Thomas Speier & Barry Wolford, "Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Processor." Hot Chips 29 Symposium (HCS), 2017 IEEE. IEEE, 2017.
• ​Barry Wolford, "Architecting a multi-core server SoC for the cloud", 2017 Linley Processor Conference

Documents

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