After international manufacturers such as Qualcomm announced the withdrawal of Arm server CPU, only a few domestic chip companies such as Tianjin Feiteng, Huawei and Huaxintong were left to do continuous design and development. Therefore, the fate and prospect of ARM server processor with domestic IC companies as the main force have also attracted the attention of Chinese electronic design industry. At the “2018 International Pan-Semiconductor Industry Investment Summit”, electronic enthusiasts interviewed Dou Qiang, the chief scientist of Tianjin Feiteng Information Technology Co., Ltd., and learned that Feiteng’s latest series of FT-2000+ products with 64 FTC661 processor cores have upgraded the technology to 16 nanometers, and the highest single-core main frequency has been upgraded to 2.6GHz, which can support DDR4 at the same time. Prior to this, the CPU series of Arm servers announced by Tianjin Feiteng include FT-2000 series with 4 cores, 16 cores FT-1500 and 64 cores of 28 nanometers.
Although China hopes to increase the chip self-sufficiency rate to 40% by 2020, Chinese companies still lack the strength in research and development and manufacturing of high-performance processors, far behind IBM, Intel, NVIDIA and AMD, etc. Even international conferences such as ISSCC and HotChips have few Chinese companies. At last year’s HC27 conference, a Chinese company named Feiteng Information Technology announced its 64-core Mars processor. At this year’s HC28 conference, this company has already taken out the physical 64-core processor and named it Feiteng 2000(FT-2000/64).
Actually, the FT-2000/64 processor was released before this year’s HC28 conference, and the technical specifications of the processor were also found from the company’s official website. It is based on the 28nm process, integrating 64 FC661 processor cores with a frequency of 1.5-2.0GHz, integrating 32MBL2 cache, extending the support for 128MBL3 cache, and supporting 16 DDR3-1600 controllers with a bandwidth of 204.8.
According to the official information before, the performance of 64-core ARM processor is comparable to that of Intel14 Xeon processor with 14 cores and 28 threads.
FT-2000/64 is mainly used in the field of high-performance and high-throughput servers, such as Internet/cloud computing servers with high throughput requirements and industrial business hosts with high computing performance requirements. Considering that China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer used Feiteng chip package as a node (but not a computing node) before, FT-2000/64 may appear in the newly developed supercomputer in China in the future.