GIGABYTE Announces Release of Production-Ready Cavium ThunderX-Based Servers 

SHANGHAI, China, July 19 -- GIGABYTE Technology, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and barebones for server applications, and Cavium Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, cloud, and data center, today announced a line-up of products built on the industry-leading ThunderX family of workload-optimized ARM server SoCs.

At a joint event in Shanghai, GIGABYTE and Cavium officially announced the release of a range of 14 server SKUs – the results of co-operation based on the Cavium ThunderX platform, utilizing GIGABYTE's almost 20 years of experience in the server industry. With these products, the partnership has produced a compelling, high performance alternative to the incumbent solutions in the market. GIGABYTE and Cavium had the honor of inviting ecosystem partners - ARM, Innodisk, Linaro, Qlogic, Red Hat, and Suse - all of which have committed resource to bringing ARM-based servers to the mainstream enterprise market - as guest speakers at the event. GIGABYTE and Cavium are working with these stakeholders to bring higher performance-per-dollar to the server market and open up a range of potential new applications.

This solution targets high performance volume servers deployed by Public/Private Cloud and Telco data centers. It is optimized for key Data Center workloads including compute, security, storage, and distributed databases. GIGABYTE ThunderX servers deliver comparable performance at a more compelling TCO than traditional x86 server systems.

Key GIGABYTE ThunderX server features:

GIGABYTE has utilized its know-how to become the first and only server vendor to capture the benefits of Cavium’s revolutionary design and bring disruptive new solutions to the market through production-ready server products, which bring about:

• Adoption of the first dual-socket ARM SoC architecture that scales up to 48 cores per processor with up to 2.0 GHz core frequency
• The highest integrated I/O capability with up to 160Gb of I/O bandwidth
• Four DDR4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting up to 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration at 2133MHz
• Best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for storage and compute applications
• A comprehensive range of designs, from cost-focused entry level solutions to high density storage and compute focused platforms

"GIGABYTE has developed and is already shipping a range of Cavium ThunderX based server products to customers in US, Europe and Asia," said Andy Chen, AVP, Network and Communications Business Unit, GIGABYTE. "Our comprehensive portfolio of ThunderX-based systems is available for order and a number of customers have already received production units. We are seeing strong demand for these ARM-based platforms – especially from cloud service providers."

A comprehensive ecosystem is key to the development of a market for ARM-based servers. To this end, we have been working with stakeholders across the value chain.

About GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE, headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, is known as a global brand in the IT industry, with employees and business channels in almost every country. Founded in 1986, GIGABYTE started as a research and development team and has since taken the lead in the world's motherboard and graphics card markets.

On top of motherboards and graphics cards, GIGABYTE has become a leading producer of server hardware. Taking advantage of many years of know-how in motherboard design and manufacturing, GIGABYTE uses the most reliable components and aims for the highest quality standards only. This focus on excellence has allowed the company to work successfully with the biggest names in the server industry over the years, fueling its dedication to keep creating innovative server solutions for the future.

Source: GIGABYTE