At a press conference held today in San Jose, Calif., Qualcomm officially announced commercial shipment of the first 10 nanometer server processor series: the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family is the first high-performance Arm-based processor series designed to run cloud workloads running in datacenters.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family is a single chip platform-level solution built using Samsung's 10 nanometer FinFET process with 18 billion transistors on only 398mm2. It contains up to 48, 64-bit, single-thread cores, running at up to 2.6 GHz frequency. The cores are connected with a bi-directional segmented ring bus with 250GBps of aggregate bandwidth to avoid performance bottlenecks under full load. To maximize performance under various use cases, the design has 512KB of shared L2 cache for every two cores, and 60MB of unified L3 cache distributed on the die. It has 6 channels of DDR4 memory and can support up to 768 GB of total DRAM capacity with 32 PCIe Gen3 lanes and 6 PCIe controllers. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family also supports Arm's TrustZone secure operating environment, and supports hypervisors for virtualization. Another feature, Memory Bandwidth Compression, allows Qualcomm's cloud customers to do real-time compression and decompression - which provides a nice performance kicker for workloads with highly compressible data. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 is able to achieve very high performance, while consuming less than 120 watts.

With a list price of $1,995, the 48 core Qualcomm Centriq 2460 processor offers greater than 4X better performance per dollar and up to 45% better performance per watt versus Intel's highest-performance Skylake processor, the Intel Xeon Platinum 818, according to Qualcomm.