Ampere today announced further roadmap details of its Ampere Altra server processor family. In March the company announced Ampere Altra, the world’s first cloud native processor, featuring 80 cores. Today, Ampere unveiled preliminary details of the expansion of the cloud-native processor family by adding Ampere Altra Max, which has 128 cores, providing customers with another cloud-optimized processor to maximize overall performance and cores-per-rack density.
Ampere Altra Max is ideal for applications that take advantage of scale-out and elastic cloud architectures. Compatible with the 80-core Ampere Altra and also supporting 2-socket platforms, Ampere Altra Max offers the industry’s highest socket-level performance and I/O scalability. It will be sampling in the fourth quarter and additional details will be provided later this year.
“In March we introduced the industry’s first cloud native processor, our 80-core Ampere Altra. Today, we are announcing the expansion of the Ampere Altra family with the first 128 core server processor, sampling in Q4 2020. We know customers need different products for specific workloads and decided to create a family of different products to meet their needs. We are very excited to share our rapid progress, driven by our continued commitment to deliver leadership performance and power efficiency,” said Renee James, Ampere Founder and CEO.
In keeping with the commitment to deliver an annual cadence of new products, Ampere has also recently completed the tape-out of a 5 nm test chip for internal validation.
The Ampere Altra family provides the flexibility to address a spectrum of workloads and Ampere is working with ecosystem partners to enable accelerators to meet specific customer requirements.
Several customers have begun to offer platforms featuring Ampere Altra.
Ecosystem Support
“Cloudflare is deeply interested in the Ampere Altra processor and its innovative architecture. We have started evaluating Ampere Altra and are excited with the preliminary performance benchmarks we are seeing. We will share these performance metrics of Ampere Altra later in the year. Cloudflare is also excited to be engaged with Ampere on the Ampere Altra Max processor with 128 cores and can’t wait to test it. ” – Nitin Rao, Head of Global Infrastructure, Cloudflare.
“We are excited to announce GenyMotion has been ported to Ampere platforms. Customers who are using our cloud-based Android virtual devices demand scalability and the performance boost of running Arm native applications on an Arm-based server. It is exciting to see a high performant Arm server processor, Ampere Altra, available now. Ampere Altra enables unparalleled scalability and density to run our Android virtual devices on the cloud ” – Tim Danford, Chief Executive Officer, Genymobile.
“NVIDIA has moved quickly to bring its CUDA-X collection of libraries, tools, and technologies to deliver GPU acceleration to the thriving Arm ecosystem. We are happy to collaborate with Ampere and partners building reference designs that demonstrate the best combinations of GPU and CPU performance optimized for accelerated computing.” – Duncan Poole, Director of Platform Alliances, NVIDIA.
“We are excited to extend our partnership with Ampere by providing early access to their new Ampere Altra processors. Our shared passion for pushing the boundaries of performance for cloud-native applications is complemented by an equally deep commitment to engaging with the software ecosystem early and often. With this early access program our users, and the community at large, can experience what’s next with silicon, today.” – Zac Smith, Managing Director of Bare Metal Packet, an Equinix Company.
“We are excited to offer Ampere products to our customers in the coming months. Adding the Ampere Altra processor and associated servers to our portfolio will enable Phoenics to provide our customers with key solutions for cloud, storage, edge and other server applications.” – Peter Rooks, President, Phoenics Electronics, an Avnet Company.
“At Scaleway we strive to provide diversity of architectures tailored to meet the variety of cloud workloads our customers run. We were among the first to offer Arm and Arm64 based virtual instances and bare-metal systems in the cloud. The new Ampere Altra processor brings us a new world of performance on Arm64 architecture, and enables new cross usage in the cloud for all sizes of workloads. We are pleased to work closely with Ampere and are delighted to say that we’re evaluating Ampere Altra for the new breeze of our Arm64 cloud instances in late 2020.” – Scaleway.
