Cavium Thunder ARMv8 Processors Now Supported In Ubuntu 13.10

Cavium has announced that the company’s Thunder ARMv8 processors are now supported in Canonical’s Ubuntu 13.10, making Thunder the first 64-bit processor to be supported in Ubuntu Server 13.10.

Amer Haider (News - Alert), vice president of Corporate and Business Development at Cavium said, “Ubuntu is widely deployed as the Linux server OS of choice in large cloud and datacenters. Canonical’s support for our Thunder ARMv8 64-bit processor family will enable cloud and datacenter operators to reduce their cost and power consumption. Ubuntu (News - Alert) Server 13.10 with built-in support for Thunder’s cloud accelerators will help customers significantly improve application performance and responsiveness for targeted workloads as compared to existing processor solutions.”

Cavium is engaged in the development of 64-bit microprocessors for datacenters, enterprise clients and service provider infrastructure environment. The Thunder suite of processors from the company is embedded into a unique system on chip (SoC) architecture, specifically optimized for target applications in datacenter and cloud environments.

The new developer platform combining Ubuntu Server 13.10 running on Thunder ARMv8 processors will be available in HP’s Moonshot Discovery Lab enabling cloud operators and developers to initiate development and testing on the next generation cloud centric servers. HP Discovery Lab enables benchmarking of applications on HP Moonshot within advanced energy saving servers.

Christian Reis, vice president Hyperscale at Canonical said, “A new wave of low-power, ultra-dense system on a chip hardware, like Cavium’s Thunder ARMv8, are re-defining the future of sustainable data centers. Certifying those on Ubuntu, the platform that has been built for scale out workloads, means customers will benefit from high performance, reduced costs and energy savings. Ubuntu Server 13.10 developer preview on Cavium’s Thunder processors provides the same OS experience as x86 platforms, meaning developers can easily adopt, deploy and migrate to Thunder based scale out environments for cloud workloads.”