SynQuacer™ E-Series is a software development environment compliant with Linaro’s 96Boards open hardware specification. The product includes a "SC2A11" multi-core processor and was jointly developed by Socionext Inc., Linaro, and GIGABYTE.
The Socionext "SC2A11" is a scalable, multi-core chip with 24 cores of ARM® Cortex-A53 for building a highly-integrated and low power server system. The high-efficient chip supports cloud and edge computing essential for the explosion of new IoT applications.
By providing this software development environment, Socionext hope to contributes to the development acceleration for ARM ®-based software. This new development environment helps to expand ARM®-based software in a broad range of applications including IoT gateway, edge computing and server systems.
Features
- Development environment supports ARM® v8 architecture including high-speed I/F.
- High bandwidth DDR I/F (up to 64GB = 16GB x 4 slots)
Buy Direct
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Socionext Single Board Computer - Linaro96Board |
Specifications
| External Form | Standard MicroATX Form Factor |
| SoC | Socionext SC2A11 |
| DDR I/F | 1 x 4GB DDR4-2133 UDIMM without ECC (up to 4 x 16GB DDR4-2133 RDIMM with ECC) |
| LAN | 2ch 1Gbps |
| PCIe I/F | Two of 1 Lane per slot, one 16 Lanes slot
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| Other | 1 x UART via micro USB for console, 40pin LS Expansion Connector, RTC |
Why Conventional Servers Aren’t a Fit for Cloud Computing at Scale
Our appetite for online services is ferocious – and growing. Over 3.8 billion people worldwide, half the world’s population, regularly use the internet. Consumers rely on cloud services for an increasing variety of transactions, ranging from entertainment, to social networking, video streaming and more. And it isn’t just people. The IoT is steadily linking more devices to networks all the time, amplifying the number of transactions processed in the cloud.
Service providers are racing to keep pace with the explosive growth of IoT and online services. But they are struggling to cost-effectively deploy and support adequate server infrastructure using expensive and power-hungry conventional high-performance servers.
Some commercial cloud providers turn to virtualization as a potential fix. In this scenario, a scheduler in the operating system distributes tasks to virtual CPUs when there are not enough physical processors to handle processes during peak times. But there are many drawbacks to this approach. Virtualization is complex and expensive to set up and support. And because it still relies on high-performance conventional servers, virtualization consumes a lot of power even during off-peak times.
A better solution would be to tailor the server hardware to the kind of processing needed by cloud and e-commerce applications.
Distributed Processing Server Optimized for IoT and the Cloud
The Socionext distributed processing server is an ideal foundation for low-cost, highly-integrated and power-efficient server systems deployed to handle edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) data processing and cloud service applications.
The server starts off with the SC2A11A SoC, which integrates 24 cores of ARM® Cortex-A53 on a single die, and with eight processors into a processor element card connected in a cascade to a system switch board. Socionext’s proprietary high-speed CPU-to-CPU communications technology interlinks eight of these system switch boards to form a server rack. That’s 64 multi-core processors with 1,536 ARM Cortex-A53 cores in one integrated server.
