Ampere Computing speeds up designing Arm server processors for cloud data centers.
The startup Ampere Computing is preparing to launch its second-generation product. Its goal is to run databases and other heavy workloads in hyperscale cloud platforms with its new chips. The new chip will be manufactured by using a seven-nanometer process technology.
The new chip is ambitious
Jeff Wittich, Ampere’s senior VP of products told about the upcoming chip:
“The upcoming 64-bit chip, manufactured using a seven-nanometer process technology, will have 80 processing cores – more than the latest top-of-the-line x86 parts by Intel and AMD – and compete on price and performance with any server processor on the market.”
“We’re going to be right at the pinnacle of performance for what’s available in the market at that point,” he added. According to Wittich, the company plans to sample the product later this year.
Ampere is an alternative to both Intel’s and AMD’s x86 chips in the data center. Also, it powers most of the world’s smartphones. And, Arm Holdings failed many times at pushing into the data center space, with numerous companies licensing its architecture to build a server.
Next step of eMAG
eMAG that launched late last year, is a 32-core 64-bit Arm CPU. He told about eMAG saying:
“It delivers a pretty reasonable performance in a very power-efficient envelope, very TCO effective.”
Cloud provider Packet has been deploying eMAG in its data centers which are offering it as a bare-metal cloud service. eMAG is also popular with Android game developers. According to Wittich, the upcoming part, however, is “what will take us the next step in seeing Ampere increase its footprint, expand the workloads that we can go and compete in. “This isn’t an incremental improvement to the previous product. This is a giant leap forward,” he added.
The company is expected to see deployments in databases, in search, in storage, analytics, you name it – all of the big cloud use cases.