Bloomberg today quoted informed sources, 4. The world’s largest maker of mobile phone chips, Qualcomm, is preparing to give up developing data center server chips.
Informed sources also said that Qualcomm is also considering two options to close the business or find new buyers for it.
Qualcomm as the dominance of the global mobile phone chip is difficult to shake. When it comes to server chip, Qualcomm hopes to use ARM architecture to develop server chips to break the dominance of Intel in this lucrative market. However, Qualcomm’s rumors of exiting the server chip market indicate its dream. Is bursting.
Of course, Qualcomm is just one of the failures of many servers to challenge Intel X86 server dominance. Furthermore, Qualcomm's withdrawal is also a defeat of ARM. For Huawei, which has just entered the server chip field in 2016, it will eventually lose out.
Qualcomm is not surprised to exit the server chip market
In 2017, Qualcomm’s Centriq 2400 server chip was sold. This chip uses Samsung's 10nm process, and its power consumption and cost are better than those of the Intel Platinum Xeon 8180 processor.
When the chip was released in November last year, Microsoft also expressed interest in the chip, but after that, Qualcomm kept silent on progress.
Qualcomm spokesman declined to comment on the news of the withdrawal of the server chip market.
However, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said at a financial teleconference last month that Qualcomm's focus is on compressing non-core product spending.
In response to Broadcom’s hostile takeover, Qualcomm’s management had promised investors in January that it would squeeze annual expenses by US$1 billion to increase profitability.
In fact, before Qualcomm officially demonstrated its first server chip in this field in 2015, there were already several giants using ARM server chips to challenge Intel's results.
NVIDIA had explored the use of its 64-bit Tegra processor to enter the server market. It only provided graphics chips that were compatible with other companies' ARM server chips, but trying to compete in the server chip market was almost a disaster.
Samsung has also vigorously developed ARM server chips. It also dug out executives from AMD's server department for related projects, but this project was eventually abandoned.
Also AMD, AMD had high hopes for ARM server chips when its server market share continued to decline in 2014, and at that time it was expected that the share of the ARM server chip market would reach 25% in 2019.
However, the actual situation is that Intel's x86 server chips still occupy about 99% of the market share in this area. AMD's share in the server chip market also fell from 25% at its peak time to less than 1% in 2017. Obviously, ARM server chips Does not improve AMD's profitability and market share.
The AMD chip that AMD tried to return to the server market in 2017 is also the x86 architecture. ARM products have been abandoned.
Qualcomm's withdrawal is also a defeat of ARM
Samsung and AMD have not been able to leverage Intel's x86 server with ARM servers. Before further discussing the causes of failure, it is also necessary to understand why giants, including Qualcomm, want to enter the server chip market.
The reason is simple. The server can handle data in the enterprise network, and it is also the backbone of the Internet. Although its shipment volume is much smaller than that of smartphones and PCs, server chips are attractive due to their high cost for high performance and attractive profitability. .
However, Intel has the upper hand with x86 servers and has the absolute right to speak. Therefore, if you want to challenge Intel in this market, you can only look for a new architecture.
At this time, Qualcomm, Samsung, AMD and other cooperation with ARM is a win-win choice. On the one hand, it can help the ARM architecture, which has achieved great success in the mobile processor market, advance into the top-end computing market. On the other hand, Qualcomm and NVIDIA can also borrow. This shares a slice of the server chip market and even challenges Intel.
From a performance point of view, the performance of 2015's 64-core ARM server chip 'Mars' is very strong. According to SPEC2006 simulator performance, multi-core performance can be compared with Intel E5 (high-end workstation and server processor series), but single-core performance Weak; The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 mentioned above consumes more power and costs than the Intel Platinum Xeon 8180 processor.
therefore, Performance is not a major obstacle to the advancement of the ARM architecture into the top-end computing market, and the software ecosystem is more critical. Just as Intel x86 entered the mobile phone chip market due to the software ecosystem resulting in less than half the results, ARM also encountered in the PC and server chip market to enter the market The same problem.
ARM certainly realized this problem. In order to more quickly promote the 64-bit instruction set and establish a corresponding software ecosystem, ARM changed its prudence in the authorization of the ARM 32-bit instruction set in the past and authorized 64-bit instruction sets to accelerate the ecology of many powerful manufacturers. Construction, so in the ARM 32-bit instruction set era Huawei, National Defense University, and a large number of units or companies do not have ARM instruction set authorization also through the ARM to promote the 64-bit instruction set Dongfeng got the authorization.
However, the construction of the ecosystem is not an overnight event, and Intel has already dominated the server chip market. It is easy to imagine how difficult it is to construct its own ecological environment.
Qualcomm today will be Huawei's tomorrow?
In addition to ecological deficiencies, Intel's low-power server chips have completely blocked the possibility of ARM eroding the market through low-power server chips. Therefore, competition between ARM server chips and Intel can only rely on differentiation or policy protection.
We also saw that Qualcomm had found the Guizhou provincial government to establish a joint venture company Guizhou Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. to rely on the protection and investment of Chinese local governments to obtain the space for ARM server chips. However, Qualcomm is an American company after all, not too Great advantage.
Huawei, as a local company in China, acquired the ARM 64-bit instruction set. At the launch of the Kirin 950 in 2016, Huawei announced that its own chips for servers are in full swing.
Different from other vendors entering the server chip field, Hass server chips can serve the 'cloud' of Huawei's 'cloud, pipe, and end' strategy, rather than simply selling chips.
Therefore, if Huawei's ARM server chip is successfully developed in the short term, and it is not weaker than the defense department's 'Mars' performance, not only can it be produced and sold, but it can also rely on good relations with the government and operators to obtain a living space.
However, the problem of the ARM server software ecosystem is difficult to solve. More commercial companies still use the Intel x86 chip server as the mainstream.
Then, Huawei has paid a high cost for R&D of ARM servers. Under the premise that the ARM server has little room for survival, is Qualcomm's today the future of Huawei?
