Ampere® Altra® – Industry’s First 80-Core Server Processor Unveiled Brings New Level of Performance & Power Efficiency to Cloud Environments

Santa Clara, CA. (March 3, 2020) – Ampere^® announced today that it has begun shipping the Ampere^® Altra^® processor, the industry’s first 80-core server CPU and the first cloud native CPU for modern cloud and edge computing data centers. Ampere Altra is the company’s next generation cloud-focused product, and first in a new class of CPUs rolling out on an annual basis from Ampere’s roadmap, that will provide predictable high performance, secure isolation through single-threaded cores, scalability across the entire platform, and new levels of power efficiency. The Ampere Altra processor delivers 80 cores up to 210 W, giving an industry-leading performance boost for rapidly growing use cases such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, database, storage, telco stacks, edge computing, web hosting and cloud native applications.

“Ampere^® Altra^® is the first of the next generation of server microprocessors that are designed for the workloads of today in the cloud and on the edge. The Ampere^® Altra^® is delivering breakthrough performance with the industry’s first 80-core, cloud native microprocessor,” said Renee James, Ampere^® Founder and CEO. “Since our founding two years ago, Ampere’s highly experienced team has focused on developing products that bring significant and unique innovations to cloud customers. Our team’s attention is on solving customers’ needs and ensuring execution that delivers an annual cadence of new capabilities to the market. It is an exciting time for our young company as we work diligently to invent the future of the server CPU business.”

Ampere^® Altra^® was designed to provide the features that are increasingly demanded by customers and specifically optimized for cloud usage. The way that the cloud utilizes performance, security, and power efficiency is much different than in more traditional enterprise data center environments. Power consumption is also growing challenge for all modern data centers, especially those operating at hyperscale. Due to the growth in data center use cases, power consumption continues to rise. It is estimated that data centers are currently utilizing 3% of the world’s electricity and that is projected to grow to 11% by 2030. Simply scaling up existing power-hungry CPUs is not the answer to address the need for more compute to feed the data explosion.

Atiq Bajwa, Ampere’s CTO and chief architect, explained that the company chose to build Ampere^® Altra^® with single-threaded cores in order to create a processor focused on the needs of the modern cloud. Bajwa said, “CSPs strive to deliver reliable, sustained performance and high levels of isolation and security to each customer, irrespective of what other tenants may be running in multi-tenant environments. Ampere^® Altra’s single-threaded cores, and the dense, power-efficient servers they make possible, will enable our customers to maximize the number of services they can deploy in the cloud and at the edge.”

Ampere^® Altra^® is a 64-bit Arm processor, taking advantage of the power-efficient and high- performance architecture. “The Ampere Altra processor based on the Arm^® Neoverse™ N1 platform represents a significant breakthrough in performance and power efficiency for the hyperscale cloud and edge markets,” said Rene Haas, president, IP Products Group, Arm. “ The Ampere^® Altra^®, the industry’s first 80 core server processor, has focused on what is essential for today’s workloads in the datacenter, and we are proud to support Ampere^® in demonstrating the leading technology required to address the deluge of data in a world of a trillion connected devices.”

Ampere^® has also partnered closely with TSMC to utilize the leading process technology for the highest performance, most power efficient and densest transistors. “TSMC is very pleased to see the results of our collaboration with Ampere^® in developing and manufacturing its 80-core Ampere^® Altra^® high-performance processor, which combines TSMC’s advanced N7 process technology and manufacturing excellence with Ampere’s semiconductor product and engineering development expertise,” said Bradford Paulsen, Senior Vice President Business Management, TSMC North America. “TSMC’s technology leadership and rigorous commitment to quality make it possible for our customers to accelerate their silicon innovations for the high performance compute applications and time-to-market.”

Ampere^® has worked with many partners around the globe to deliver cloud-optimized software that lead the market in performance, scalability and power efficiency, as well as delivering the tools and hardware to take advantage of Ampere Altra in cloud environments of all types: from bare metal to virtualized and containerized solutions.

Ampere^® Altra is already shipping to customers around the world, including many of the top cloud service providers with both 2-socket and 1-socket platforms available. Customers are testing Ampere^® Altr^®a today on their software stacks to drive optimized performance and power efficiency in the cloud.

“Wiwynn is excited to expand our partnership with Ampere^® to introduce our novel 2-socket platform—SV328 based on the Ampere^® Altra^® processor. The SV328 supports up to 160 processor cores, up to 192 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and up to 8 TB of DDR-4-3200 memory. This provides our customers with unparalleled scalability and flexibility to build data centers with the best TCO.”
Steven Lu, Vice President of Product Management, Wiwynn