Ampere, a chip startup has announced its intentions to deliver an arm-based chip for the hyperscale and data centre markets.
The startup, headed by former Intel president Renee James aims to tackle challenges facing the hyperscale and data centres with this new chip. Specifically the company hopes to address memory performance, cost, space and power constraints for these growing markets.
‘Momentum is building for Arm-based SoCs as an alternative to the insufficient scalability of legacy processors. Ampere understands this and combines its deep server expertise with a disruptive approach to hyperscale cloud compute. They join an ecosystem which is already accelerating distributed intelligence with the arm architecture, and building an infrastructure designed to tackle the unprecedented avalanches of data generated by billions, and ultimately trillions, of connected devices’ commented Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Business Unit, Arm.
Ampere processors offer a custom core based on the Armv8-A 64-bit server operating at up to 3.3 GHz, 1TB of memory at a power envelope of 125 watts. The processors are sampling now and are expected to go into production in the second half of 2018
‘We have an opportunity with cloud computing to take a fresh approach with products that are built to address the new software ecosystem,’ said James.
‘The workloads moving to the cloud require more memory, and at the same time, customers have stringent requirements for power, size and costs. The software that runs the cloud enables Ampere to design with a different point of view. The Ampere team’s approach and architecture meets the expectation on performance and power and gives customers the freedom to accelerate the delivery of the most memory-intensive applications and workloads such as AI, big data, storage and database in their next-generation data centres’ James added.
‘Ampere’s high memory capacity and bandwidth per socket provides a strong platform for Oracle’s enterprise workloads. We look forward to working with Ampere on delivering high-performance solutions to our customer’ stated Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle.
‘Software coupled with the next generation of processors like those developed by Ampere is important in hybrid cloud computing. We are pleased to collaborate with Ampere to help deliver even more innovations for cloud computing’ said Tim Burke, vice president, Linux Engineering, Red Hat.
