2020 has been an extremely successful year for Arm’s infrastructure and enterprise endeavours, as it was the year where we’ve seen fruition of the company’s “Neoverse” line of CPU microarchitectures hit the market in the form of Amazon’s new Graviton2 design as well as Ampere’s Altra server processor. Arm had first introduced the Neoverse N1 back in early 2019 and if you weren’t convinced of the Arm server promise with the Graviton2, the more powerful and super-sized Altra certainly should have turned some heads.

Inarguably the first generation of Arm servers that are truly competitive at the top end of performance, Arm is now finally achieving a goal the company has had in their sights for several years now, gaining real market share against the x86 incumbents.

Fast-forward to 2021, the Neoverse N1 design today employed in designs such as the Ampere Altra is still competitive, or beating the newest generation AMD or Intel designs – a situation that which a few years ago seemed farfetched. We recommend catching up on these important review pieces over the last 2 years to get an accurate picture of today’s market:


(Note: Y axis left chart starts at 50%)

Arm is very open that their main priority with the Neoverse line of products is gaining cloud footprint deployment market share, and as an example of the new-found success is an estimate into Amazon’s own AWS instance additions throughout 2020, where the new Arm-based Graviton2 is said to be the dominant hardware deployment, picking up the majority of share that’s being lost by Intel.

Looking towards 2022 and Beyond

Today, we’re pivoting towards the future and the new Neoverse V1 and Neoverse N2 generation of products. Arm had already tested the new products last September, teasing a few characteristics of the new designs, but falling short of disclosing more concrete details about the new microarchitectures. Following last month’s announcement of the Armv9 architecture, we’re now finally ready to dive into the two new CPU microarchitectures as well as the new CMN-700 mesh network.

As presented back in September, this generation of Neoverse CPU microarchitectures differ themselves in that we’re talking about two quite different products, aimed at different goals and market segments. The Neoverse V1 represents a new line-up for Arm, with a CPU microarchitecture that is aiming itself for more HPC-like workloads and designs oriented towards such markets, while the Neoverse N2 is more of a straight-up successor to the Neoverse N1 and infrastructure and cloud deployments in the same way that the N1 sees itself today in products such as the Graviton or Altra processors.

For readers who are familiar with Arm’s mobile CPU microarchitectures, there’s definitely very large similarities between the designs – even though Arm’s marketing seems to be oddly reluctant to make such kind of comparisons, which is why I made the above chart which more clearly tries to depict the similarities between design generations.

The original Neoverse N1 as seen in the Graviton2 and Altra Q processors had been a derivative, or better said, a sibling microarchitecture, to the Cortex-A76, which had been employed in the 2019 generation of Cortex-A76 mobile SoCs such as the Snapdragon 855. Naturally, the Neoverse designs had server-oriented features and changes that aren’t present in the mobile counterparts.

Similarly to how the N1 was related to the A76, the new generation V1 and N2 microarchitectures are related to newer designs in the Cortex-portfolio. The V1 is related to the Cortex-X1 which we’ve seen in this year’s new mobile SoCs such as the Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100. The Neoverse N2 on the other hand is related to an upcoming new Cortex-A microarchitecture which we expect to hear more about in the following few months. Throughout the piece today we’ll make a few more references to this generational disconnect between the V1 and N2, and it’s important to remember that the N2 is a newer design, albeit aimed at different performance and efficiency points.

This decoupling of design goals between the V1 and N2 for Arm comes through the company’s attempt to target more specific markets where the end products might have different priorities, much like how in the mobile space the new Cortex-X series prioritises per-core performance while the Cortex-A series continues to focus on the best PPA. Similarly, the V1 focuses on maximised performance at lower efficiency, with features such as wider SIMD units (2x256b SVE), while the N2 continues the scale-out philosophy of having the best power-efficiency while still moving forward performance through generational IPC improvements.

In today’s piece, we’ll be diving into the new microarchitectural changes of the V1, N2, as well as Arm’s newest generation mesh interconnect IP, the CMN-700, which is expected to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Arm infrastructure processors.

Table of contents:

The Neoverse V1 Microarchitecture: X1 with SVE?
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  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    ‘Fast-forward to 2021, the Neoverse N1 design today employed in designs such as the Ampere Altra is still competitive, or beating the newest generation AMD or Intel designs – a situation that which a few years ago seemed anything but farfetched.’

    Hmm... That last bit is odd. Either it’s just ‘farfetched’ or it’s ‘expected’.
  • eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    Yes, those slides look very promising; now eagerly awaiting an eventual test of one or two of these in a actual silicone. I guess then we'll see how they measure up.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    Silicone - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Not to be confused with the chemical element silicon.

    A silicone or polysiloxane is a polymer made up of siloxane (−R2Si−O−SiR2−, where R = organic group). They are typically colorless, oils or rubber-like substances. Silicones are used in sealants, adhesives, lubricants, medicine, cooking utensils, and thermal and electrical insulation.
  • eastcoast_pete - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link

    I'll have to take this up with auto-correct. It keeps changing silicon to silicone. Now that I forced it again to leave silicon alone (for the umpteenth time), maybe it will stop (:
  • Mondozai - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    Fantastic overview by Andrew. AT's most underrated reporter. Hopefully he gets more responsibility to cover more things in the future.
  • Linustechtips12#6900xt - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    AGREED
  • dotjaz - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link

    Good, finally confirmed N2 is in fact ARMv9 as suspected. Now we'll just have to wait and see how the new mobile counterparts are. Hopefully we'll see some real improvements.

    It'll be interesting to see how small the new low power v9 core is given that it has to have a 128b SVE2 pipeline instead of 2x64b NEON.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link

    > finally confirmed N2 is in fact ARMv9 as suspected.
    > Now we'll just have to wait and see how the new mobile counterparts are.
    > Hopefully we'll see some real improvements.

    The data presented on N2 doesn't give me much hope that v9 changed much, besides the feature baseline. I was hoping for something slightly revolutionary, but it's certainly not that.
  • dotjaz - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link

    > hoping for something slightly revolutionary

    We've known for a couple of years ARMv9 is just ARMv8.x rebased. Your hopes weren't realistic to begin with. Besides, what "revolutionary" features would you expect ISAs to include? Can oyu name one? ARMv8.5a+SVE2 already has everything you need to design an excellent and efficient uarch. Why re-invent the wheel just for the sake of it?
  • mode_13h - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link

    > We've known for a couple of years ARMv9 is just ARMv8.x rebased.

    You knew this according to where? It's one thing to assume that, and clearly it wasn't an unreasonable assumption, but it's another thing to *know* it. So, how did you *know* it?

    > Besides, what "revolutionary" features would you expect ISAs to include? Can oyu name one?

    It's a fair question. Generally speaking, anything that would help improve efficiency. Maybe things like scheduling hints or maybe some kind of tags to indicate memory writes that are thread-private and terminal reads. Just some examples, off the top of my head.

    > ARMv8.5a+SVE2 already has everything you need to design an excellent and efficient uarch.

    The issue I see is that IPC and efficiency gains are going to become ever more hard-won, so there needs to be some more creativity in redefining the SW/HW interface to unlock further gains. ARMv9 is going to be with us for probably another decade and it could end up having to compete with yet-to-be-identified alternatives like maybe RISC VI or something completely out of left-field. So, I see it as a wasted opportunity. A pragmatic decision, for sure, but a little disappointing.

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