Server solutions for hyperscale data centres

The Cavium ThunderX reference design can be used to build energy-efficient server solutions featuring IDT's DDR4 technology. Cavium and its industry partners developed the design to target server solutions for members of the Open Compute Project (OCP) and other hyperscale data centre customers.

"IDT's DDR4 technology offering and the company's leadership in the OCP High Performance Computing Project made them the obvious choice to team with," said Rishi Chugh, Director at Data Center Processor at Cavium, which similarly has a long history collaborating in the Open Compute community. "Our relationship with IDT enables us to deliver workload-optimised, flexible, scalable and efficient ARM-based server solutions to the data centre market, including the growing community of the OCP."

The ThunderX product family is Cavium's server processor for next-gen data centre and cloud applications, featuring high-performance custom cores, single and dual-socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity. The product family also includes integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature-rich high bandwidth network and storage IO, fully virtualised core and IO, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric.

IDT's DDR4 chipset includes register, data buffers and thermal sensors with serial presence detect (SPD). Together, they collectively enable the complete range of unbuffered dual inline memory modules (UDIMMs), registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) and load-reduced DIMMs (LRDIMMs) needed to power the next generation of enterprise and data centre servers.

"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 centres," said Rami Sethi, vice president and general manager of memory interface products at IDT. "Our solution uniquely enables users to scale memory capacity without compromising data rates in order to maximise workload performance and efficiency."

IDT's DDR4 memory is part of the company's vast portfolio of technologies enabling hyperscale data servers, high-performance computing clusters and enterprise servers. IDT also offers digital power management solutions to optimise overall data centre performance and power usage, enabling high-density solutions required for space-constrained servers. IDT provides an extensive high-performance timing portfolio, PCIe retimers, PCIe switches and low-latency RapidIO interconnect to enable analytics workloads in the data centre.

The ThunderX reference design is available directly from Cavium.