This Micro-ATX Motherboard is Based on Phytium FT2000/4 Arm Desktop Processor @ 3.0 GHz

There have been attempts to bring Arm processors to desktop PC’s in recent years with projects such as 96Boards Synquacer based on SocioNext SC2A11 24-core Cortex-A53 server processor or Clearfog-ITX workstation equipped with the more powerful NXP LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex A72 networkingprocessor @ 2.2 GHz.

Those solutions were also based server and networking SoCs, but there may soon be another option specifically designed for Arm Desktop PCs as a photo of an Arm Micro-ATX motherboard just showed up on Twitter.

Arm Micro-ATX Desktop PC Motherboard
Click to Enlarge

Here are the specifications we derive from the Tweet and the photo:

  • SoC – Phytium FT2000/4 quad core custom Armv8 (FTC663) desktop processor @ 2.6 – 3.0 GHz with 4MB L2 Cache (2MB per two cores) and 4MB L3 Cache; 16nm process; 10W power consumption; 1144-pin FCBGA package (35×35 mm)
  • System Memory – 2x SO-DIMM slot supporting 72-bit (ECC) DDR4-3200  memory
  • Storage – 4x SATA 3.0 connectors; MicroSD card slot
  • Video Output – N/A – Discrete PCIe graphics card required
  • Audio – Combo jack with 3x 3.5mm port, audio header
  • Networking – 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports
  • USB – 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 1x USB 3.0 interface via header and  2x USB 2.0 interfaces via header
  • Expansion – 1x PCIe x16 and 2x PCIe x8 slots, various pin headers
  • Misc – RS-232 serial port, RTC with battery, buzzer, buttons
  • Power Supply – ATX connector
  • Dimensions – 244 x 244 mm (Micro-ATX form factor)

Phytium FT-2000/4

That’s about all we know about the “FT-2000/4 Demo” motherboard so far, but if you want to know more about the processor check out last month’s announcement (in Chinese), where you’ll also find documentation (still in Chinese) after scrolling a bit.

Basically Phytium FT-2000/4 is an Armv8 desktop processor which consumes up to 10 Watts (3.8W at 1 GHz), and achieves 61.1 and 62.5 points in respectively SPEC2006 integer and the floating-point benchmarks.

The company further explains the desktop PC version of “Galaxy Kirin” operating system (is that Ubuntu Kylin?) has been ported to the processor, and other companies have also been involved in software development. Manufactures such as Lenovo, Baolongda, Lianda, Chuangzhicheng, EVOC, Hanwei and others are developing FT-2000/4-based desktops, notebooks, and all-in-one PC that will launch in Q4 2019 onwards. So we should probably watch that space.

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41 Comments
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blu
blu
5 years ago

Great investigation work on the chip, Jean-Luc! I spent a good deal of time yesterday in vain attempts at figuring out what this chips was.

willy
willy
5 years ago

At the moment I see ARM workstations as mostly aimed at developers, who spend a lot of their time compiling. Having only 4 ARM cores, even good ones, is not going to make it a more interesting machine than what the regular developer CPU like i7-9700 (8 cores at 3 to 4.7 GHz) can bring for ~$300. At least the clearfog brought 16 cores to help.

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

At least it has gigabit ethernet. Will be interesting to see if those DIMM sockets will accept any old modules from Amazon.

blu
blu
5 years ago

While honeycomb* bringing 16 cores @ 2GHz + DIMMS is a welcome offer, what was mainly missing so far in arm dev world, IMO, was reasonable CPU perf + PCIe availability + SBSA — something that macchiatobin attempted, but largely failed at the PCIe & SBSA departments.

* clearfog got renamed.

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

TIL: Putting a bog standard ARM SoC on a massive board makes it desktop class.

Laurent
Laurent
5 years ago

Phytium makes server chips. It can be argued that this does not necessarily make it a good WS chip, but that’s not a standard ARM SoC.

willy
willy
5 years ago

especially considering the rare ARM cores we see reaching 3 GHz 🙂

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

while most “desktop” class CPUs are turboing at 4GHz or more.

William Barath
5 years ago

Ryzen Zen2 can retire 16 instructions per cycle per core. Apple’s Twister closely matches Zen2 clock for clock in single threaded performance. Phytium 663 can retire 4 instructions per cycle per core, to put things in perspective. This won’t set any world benchmarking records but it’s not terrible. It’s performance is similar to a Xeon E3-1220 V1 or i3-2100. You can get real work done on it. If you need an ARM target to run your code on, this isn’t a terrible product, but I’d recommend you look at 96Boards Snapdragon products since those will run circles around this at… Read more »

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

>You can get real work done on it.

I think even if that is true getting real work done on this thing would be far slower and more painful than doing it on an old core 2 duo laptop.

TLS
TLS
5 years ago

SATA doesn’t seem to be native, but rather via a third party PCIe controller. The same appears to be true for USB 3.0.
There a socket for what appears to be SPI flash, much like a BIOS chip socket on a regular PC motherboard.

William Barath
5 years ago

FT2000/4 is a 4-year-old core. In that time there’s no public reviews, benchmarks, or community. Either there’s a very forceful embargo in place by the company, or nobody bought it. Probably a bad mix of both.

“Kirin” is most likely an intentional misuse of HiSilicon’s trademark A73-derived product, to create search traffic and fool ignorant readers who will see the name and feel trust without understanding the reference in context.

That’s a common low-end-chinesium product marketing tactic.

blu
blu
5 years ago

You’re thinking of FT-1500A/4 (https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/phytium/feiteng#FT-2000)

William Barath
5 years ago

No. FT2000/64 was released as a “supercomputing” chip early 2016. FT2000/4 is a low-end part intended for sample implementations.

http://vrworld.com/2016/08/29/china-now-leads-server-race-meet-phytium-mars-processor/

William Barath
5 years ago

I believe they’re still 4-way ARMV8 cores with enhanced streaming SIMD.
Hisilicon Kirin are ARMV9 A73 cores which are much faster clock for clock.

Somebody needs to smack them for inappropriate namedropping to elevate their marketing.

There’s still zero public benchmarks, reviews, or community. That says a lot.

If they want to elevate their credibility, they should put boards in the hands of Anandtech, Phoronix, Tom’s, STH, and CNX, instead of misusing competitor trademarks.

maz
maz
5 years ago

ARMv9? Not quite. A73 is an ARMv8.0 core.

William Barath
5 years ago

Sorry, ARMV8-A

tkaiser
tkaiser
5 years ago

> instead of misusing competitor trademarks.

Who is doing this? On these CPUs some modified Ubuntu called Kylin can run: http://www.kylinos.cn/news_show.aspx?id=2880 (containing with Kydroid the ability to run Android apps on these ARM thingies)

blu
blu
5 years ago

That article repeats what I posted. There are no evidences of a 10W “2000/4” part back in 2016. There are evidences of a 15W “1500A/4” part from 2016 @ 28nm.

William Barath
5 years ago

I got it from here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=https://xueqiu.com/8800458425/133199302 “On September 19th, Tianjin Feiteng officially released the newly developed desktop processor FT-2000/4. The performance of this product reached a new high. It is the highest frequency, the lowest power consumption, the latest technology, and the leading cache. A CPU product for desktop terminals. The most advanced FT-2000/4 processor in China has reached the mainstream CPU level in 2016.” But it’s a misquote by the site. They mean the 2019 part in comparison to Intel Skylake 2016. So yes, my bad, this is a 2019 part. It’s still ARMv8 with a 4-way back end… Read more »

William Barath
5 years ago

The 661 arch had 4ALU+2FP dispatch, 32/32KL1, 2ML2 shared between 4 cores, additional 2ML3 per core (must be victim mode) 4 decoders, OOO but no mention of depth or rename buffer size, no mention of TLB size, TAGE branch predictor but no mention of its cache size, no mention of any uOP cache.

William Barath
5 years ago

661: 50+ pipeline stages, 4 clock L1 cache load latency, operand and stride detection prefetch, in-order retirement, 160 entry ROB, 3-cycle FMUL and FADD, 6-cycle FMA, effectively 8 step NEON queues for each of the 4 ALU and FP units.

blu
blu
5 years ago

50+ pipeline stages? Surely a typo? Perhaps 15?

William Barath
5 years ago

“160 ISN ROB; 210+ ISN in-flight”. 210/4-issue = 52+ pipeline stages. Even if we only consider filling the ROB alone and forget all other latency mitigation inputs to the formula for picking the pipeline depth – there’s 160 entries. You’d never come close to filling that with a 4 instruction issue unless you have a 50 stage pipeline, and that’s assuming at least 80% utilisation of of the decoders. Not all code can be that dense. Or I guess you could have a 40 stage pipeline ( = 40×4 = 160 ROB size) and be super optimistic about always decoding… Read more »

blu
blu
5 years ago

Wait, you’re counting the breadth and depth of the pipeline, whereas pipeline stages are counted only towards the depth of the pipeline. Perhaps you meant to say ‘pipeline stations’, not stages. For instance CA72 is a 13-18 (min-max) stage deep pipeline, intel’s CSL is 14-19 (min-max). Deepest intel was Prescott with 31 stages (and that was considered a major design flaw).

William Barath
5 years ago

Compare Zen1 with 192 ROB, divided by 8 retire units is 24, reported as “19+” With only 4 decode units it makes sense that they’ll seldom fill the ROB, and it makes sense that some instructions are discarded and don’t need to be retired (branch not taken) So I trust that figure of 19+. The 663 has 4 decode and 4 retire, and they say they manage 210 instructions in flight. 210 / 4 = 52 cycles. In my book if there’s zero cache misses, zero logic unit resource shortages, zero bubbles due to interdependent operands, then how many cycles… Read more »

blu
blu
5 years ago

Ok, I see where the confusion comes from. Here’s the thing about ROBs — they are a measure of the breadth of the execution part of the pipeline, but also, and more importantly, of the ‘out-of-orderness’ of the pipeline. A uop may spend way more than a single cycle in the ROB, until all its pre-conditions are met — ie. normally until its predecessor uops get retired. So the higher the OoO-ness of the pipleline, the larger the ROB needs to be, all other things (incl pipeline breadth) considered equal Take zen1, for instance — the execution engines that directly… Read more »

William Barath
5 years ago

I get what you’re saying, but you don’t seem to get what I’m saying, lol.

Maybe you can propose how when there’s 210 instructions in flight and 4 in-order retirement units, the next instruction to be loaded can take the 15 cycles you suggested this core will take to retire all 211 instructions. Are you suggesting that 3.5 instructions on average can be fused for retirement?

blu
blu
5 years ago

No it doesn’t fuse 3.5 instructions. And you’re clearly not getting what I’m saying. So let me rephrase it: An OoO pipeline may be, e.g. 5 stages deep, and have 200 instructions in flight. Why? Because an instruction may be sitting for hundreds clocks in the ROB, while new instructions are being decoded and dispatched through the pipeline. Consider the following pseudo-code: ld rn, [address] mov rx, 42 .. mov ry, 42 (mov repeated 199 times, and the entire sequence is in a ROB of 200 entries) The first op cache-misses, which will keep the rest of the ROB from… Read more »

William Barath
5 years ago

I get that the uarch calls it a 5 stage pipeline, but once the ROB is full it becomes impossible for the uarch to process the next loaded instruction in less than 52 cycles without some black magic. Instruction goes in, no cache misses, no bubbles, 52+5 cycles pass before the instruction is retired, minimum. Calling that a 5 stage pipeline is disingenuous, if technically accurate. That is the point you are ignoring over and over. I’m happy to agree that the uarch designer will call it somewhat less.

Willy
Willy
5 years ago

It’s what blu explains. It’s just a queue in which the control unit can pick any waiting instruction. This is particularly important when combined with branch prediction because this is what allows to fetch one or the other and be able to pick the right one in the least number of cycles possible. You should not confuse this with latency added to processing an instruction. In fact all instructions get a high latency but you don’t care, what matters is that a large enough number of instructions following the current one have already been prefetched and are ready to be… Read more »

William Barath
5 years ago

For 663 the only changes I can find are layout (2 cores per L2 instead of 4) and cache differences (L2/L3 effectively doubled because there’s half as many cores per cluster, otherwise same specs, L1 remains at 32/32k) and of course the process shrink, clock rise, NEON throughput improvement, and the memory bus jump from DDR3-1600 to DDR4-3200. The TAGE branch predictor works very well with DDR4 as implemented by AMD for Zen2 so the extra DDR4 latency shouldn’t prevent it from realising near double memory performance. There’s no mention of any cycle improvements or dispatch/decode/execute/retire width changes in the… Read more »

Theguyuk
Theguyuk
5 years ago

No use google Chrome and brute force translate the CNX linked Chinese pages to English ( took two attempts on my A95 F2 ), they talk about the new chip and changed features.

William Barath
5 years ago

Yeah I read them but they don’t go into the the core microarch in any detail.

Tim Snider
Tim Snider
5 years ago

While I heartily welcome the idea of ARM desktops… using googles automatic translation on the page reveals some interesting things: “CPU-based built-in security can provide a fundamental and reliable security base for system security. Feiteng proposes a proprietary processor security platform architecture standard PSPA (Phytium Security Platform Architecture), which defines the software and hardware implementation specifications related to Feiteng chip security. The FT-2000/4 supports the PSPA standard and supports the SM2, SM3, and SM4 national secret algorithms to implement trusted computing from the CPU level and effectively escort information security.” While the FT-2000/4 processor apparently supports the ARMv8 instruction set,… Read more »

William Barath
5 years ago

No worse than it being controlled in USA or EU. Not quite as bad as it being controlled in Australia.. if you’ve been following the news. Australia has passed legislation mandating government backdoors in all encrypted communications. I’m not sure how they plan to enforce that, but it’s doomed by design so no good can possibly come of it, and the poor citizens are at the mercy of idiots who believe they are enforcing something good on their people… which is heart-shreddingly sad because the best of the type of people who aspire to those positions will probably commit suicide… Read more »

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

This is the same setup used almost everywhere. You get access to the machine once the trusted stuff is setup and can load whatever kernel you like. The issue is do you trust the trusted components supplied by the vendor that can’t be replaced.

William Barath
5 years ago

And we never know that, even with Open Hardware, because there’s no oversight in manufacturing unless we make it ourselves. So we have to accept whether we trust our supplier(s), open or not, partisan or not. If we choose not to trust them, then we need to be fully honest with ourselves about who and what and WHY we do trust another, instead of fooling ourselves that partisan or open = trustworthy, when the blind trust we put in manufacturing affects all camps equally. Here I mean the manufacture of each individual component, not the assembly workers of the final… Read more »

dgp
dgp
5 years ago

I wouldn’t trust any vendor but I trust random Chinese companies using the state mandated special ciphers less than the rest of them. Knowing what their Linux ports look like I wouldn’t expect their signing etc to actually work properly anyways.

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