Qualcomm Incorporated, through its subsidiary, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. (QDT), on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate next generation cloud services on its 10 nanometer Qualcomm Centriq 2400 platform. This collaboration will span multiple future generations of hardware, software and systems.

With the goal of enabling a variety of cloud workloads to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform powered by Qualcomm Centriq 2400 server solutions, QDT today submitted a server specification using its advanced 10 nanometer Qualcomm Centriq 2400 platform to OCP. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard server specification is based on the latest version of Microsoft's Project Olympus. Moreover, QDT today conducted the first public demonstration of Windows Server, developed for Microsoft's internal use, powered by the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor.

QDT has been working with Microsoft for several years on ARM-based server enablement and has onsite engineering at Microsoft to collaboratively optimize a version of Windows Server, for Microsoft's internal use in its data centers, on Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based systems. QDT's OCP submission is the result of a multi-faceted, multi-level engagement between the two companies to facilitate ARM adoption into the data center. It encompasses multiple areas of hardware and software including board development, firmware, operating system, compilers and tools, and CoreCLR.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard pairs QDT's recently announced 10nm, 48-core server processor with the most advanced interfaces for memory, network, and peripherals enabling the OCP community to access and design ARM-based servers for the most common cloud compute workloads. It fits into a standard 1U server system, offering system vendors the flexibility to create innovative, configurable designs for compute-intensive data center workloads. It can be paired with compute accelerators, multi-host NICs, and leading-edge storage technologies such as NVMe to optimize performance for specific workloads.

"QDT is accelerating innovation in data centers by delivering the world's first 10nm server platform. Our collaboration with Microsoft and contribution to the OCP community enables innovations such as Qualcomm Centriq 2400 to be designed in and deployed into the data centers rapidly. In collaborating with Microsoft and other industry leading partners, we are democratizing system design and enabling a broad-based ARM server ecosystem," said Ram Peddibhotla, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc.

"Microsoft and QDT are collaborating with an eye to the future addressing server acceleration and memory technologies that have the potential to shape the data center of tomorrow. Our joint work on Windows Server for Microsoft's internal use, and the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard server specification, compatible with Microsoft's Project Olympus, is an important step toward enabling our cloud services to run on QDT-based server platforms," said Dr. Leendert van Doorn, distinguished engineer, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp.

As a sign of further support and commitment to this ecosystem, QDT is also pleased to announce that it has joined the Open Compute Project Foundation as a gold member. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 motherboard contribution to OCP underscores not only open hardware innovation but also enablement by technology partners to deliver enterprise-level OS, firmware, co-processors, interconnects, Java and other technologies to enable ARM ecosystems in the data center. QDT continues to work with leading companies including Red Hat, Canonical, Mellanox, Xilinx, and AMI, to enable a rich ecosystem for market readiness and software build-out.