A new chip maker, Ampere Computing, has launched this week with the intent of improving the cloud computing experience. Led by CEO Renee James, former president of Intel, the team consists of semiconductor and cloud computing experts.
“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.”
Backed by The Carlyle Group, the company’s 64-bit chip ARM-based server is designed for computing tasks in corporate data centers. The features include integrated mixed signal I/O features, error-correcting code, and RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability). Before announcing the company to the public, James wanted to test Ampere’s 32-core server processor, codenamed Skylark, to several companies including Oracle, Lenovo, and Microsoft.
“We’re excited to welcome Ampere Computing to the ARM 64 server ecosystem. As a new company with a leadership team that has years of experience, Ampere Computing helps increase innovation in the ARM 64 server ecosystem and their roadmap is well aligned with the needs of our hyperscale cloud workloads,” said Dr. Leendert van Doorn, a distinguished engineer in the Azure cloud division of Microsoft.
“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 centers,” said James. ARM servers use a scale-out architecture to share power and processing needs across myriad smaller chips, whereas the computing Intel x86 architecture scales up the speed and power of each processor to handle heavier loads.
Currently, the Skylark processors are being sampled and will be in production in the second half of the year. Ampere is contracting out the manufacture of the processors.
