This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(May 2023) |
AMPERE | |
Company type | Private |
Industry | Semiconductors |
Founded | 2017 |
Founder | Renée James |
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
|
Products | Integrated circuits Microprocessors Cloud-native processor |
Number of employees | 1100 (2021) |
Website | amperecomputing |
Footnotes /references [1] |
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. Ampere also has offices in: Portland, Oregon; Taipei, Taiwan; [2] Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India; [2] Warsaw, Poland; [3] and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. [4]
Ampere Computing was founded in the Fall of 2017 by Renée James, [5] ex-President of Intel, with funding from The Carlyle Group. James acquired a team from MACOM Technology Solutions (formerly AppliedMicro) in addition to several industry hires to start the company. [6] [7] [8] [9] Ampere Computing is an ARM architecture licensee and develops its own server microprocessors. [10] Ampere fabricates its products at TSMC. [11]
In April 2019, Ampere announced its second major investment round, including investment from Arm Holdings and Oracle Corporation. [9] [12] In June 2019, Nvidia announced a partnership with Ampere to bring support for Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). [13] [14] In November 2019, Nvidia announced a reference design platform for graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated ARM-based servers including Ampere. [15]
In the first half of 2020, Ampere announced Ampere Altra an 80-core and Ampere Altra Max a 128-core processor without the use of simultaneous multithreading. [16]
In March 2020, the company announced a partnership with Oracle. [17] In September of that year, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and virtual machine instances in early 2021 based on Ampere Altra. [18]
In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups by CRN . [19]
In May 2021, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft. [20] In July of that year, Ampere acquired OnSpecta, an AI technology startup. [21] After the acquisition, the companies were able to demonstrate four times faster acceleration on Ampere-based instances running AI-inference workloads.[ citation needed ]
In April 2022, Ampere said that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling its intent to go public. [22]
In June 2022, HPE announced their Gen11 ProLiant system would use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors. [23]
In July 2022, Google announced T2A instances using Ampere Altra in the Google cloud and in August 2022 Microsoft announced their instances of Ampere running in Azure. [24]
Ampere develops ARM-based computer processors and CPU cores under their Altra brands. [16] These are used in databases, media encoding, web services, network acceleration, mobile gaming, AI inference processing, and other applications and programs that need to scale. [25]
On February 5, 2018, Ampere announced the eMAG 8180 featuring 32x Skylark cores fabricated on TSMC’s 16FF+ process. It supports a turbo of up to 3.3 GHz with a TDP of 125 W, 8ch 64-bit DDR4, up to 1 TB DDR4 per socket, and 42x PCIe 3.0 Lanes. [26] The Skylark cores were based on AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3. [26] [27] Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking. [28] On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores. [29]
On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80 cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process for hyperscale computing. [30] [31] [32] It was the first server-grade processor to include 80 cores and the Q80-30 conserves power by running at 161 W in use. [30] The cores are semi-custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications. [33] It supports a frequency of up to 3.3 GHz with TDP of 250 W, 8ch 72-bit DDR4, up to 4 TB DDR4-3200 per socket, 128x PCIe 4.0 Lanes, 1 MB L2 per core and 32 MB SLC. [31] [32]
Ampere also announced their roadmap with Ampere Altra Max (2021) in development and AmpereOne (2022) defined. [34]
The 128-core Altra Max was released in 2021 and targeted hyperscale cloud providers. [35] It uses the same server socket and platforms as Ampere Altra, and both products have one thread per core. [36] The Altra Max CPUs provide 128 Arm v8.2+ cores per chip and run up to 3.0 GHz. They also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4. [37]
Also in 2021, Oracle launched its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere Altra processors. [38]
In February 2022, Ampere and Rigetti Computing announced a strategic partnership to create hybrid quantum-classical computers. [39] The companies will combine Ampere’s Altra Max CPUs with Rigetti’s Quantum Processing Units (QPU) in cloud-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments. [39]
In April, Microsoft previewed its Azure Virtual Machines running on the Ampere Altra. [25] The VMs run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open source databases, cloud native .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and other processes. [25]
In May, Ampere announced the sampling of AmpereOne CPUs, 5 nanometer chips based on its in-house Ampere-developed core. [40] AmpereOne will add support for DDR5 main memory and PCIe Gen5 peripherals. [40]
On June 28, 2022, HPE became first tier-one server provider to offer compute with optimized cloud-native silicon for service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with new line of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers, using Ampere® Altra® and Ampere® Altra® Max processors, delivering high performance and power efficiency.[ citation needed ]
During April 2023, Ampere released the Altra developer's kit, a IoT Prototype Kit based on Ampere Altra, aimed at cloud developers, available in 32-core, 64-core, and 80-core formats. [41]
Ampere’s customers include Microsoft Azure, [42] Tencent Cloud, Oracle, [43] ByteDance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), [23] Cloudflare, Equinix, Kingsoft Cloud, Meituan, Scaleway, UCloud, Foxconn Industrial Internet, Gigabyte, Inspur, Cruise, [44] Hetzner, Project Ronin, [45] Wiwynn and Google Cloud Platform [46]
Cruise uses an Ampere Altra variant for its autonomous driving unit. The CPU was selected because of its throughput and low power consumption. [44]
In 2021, Oracle, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance committed to using Ampere’s customized chips, first announced in May. [47] In April 2022, Microsoft previewed Ampere Altra processors in its new Azure D-and E- series virtual machines. [48] The Dpsv5 series is built for Linux enterprise application types, and the Epsv5 series is for memory-intensive Linux workloads. [48] They provide up to 64 vCPUs, include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbps networking, and high-performance local SSD storage. [49]
In 2022, Microsoft’s Ampere Altra-based Azure servers became the first cloud solution provider server to be Arm SystemReady SR certified. [50] The Azure VMs, powered by Altra processors, were also the first to be SystemReady Virtual Environment standard certified. SystemReady defines a set of firmware and hardware standards as a baseline for system development for software developers, original equipment vendors, and chipmakers. [50]
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
Itanium is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Launched in June 2001, Intel initially marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. In the concept phase, engineers said "we could run circles around PowerPC...we could kill the x86." Early predictions were that IA-64 would expand to the lower-end servers, supplanting Xeon, and eventually penetrate into the personal computers, eventually to supplant reduced instruction set computing (RISC) and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications.
Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. The microprocessors currently used in almost all personal computers are multi-core.
Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company focusing on manycore embedded processor design. The company shipped multiple processors in the TILE64, TILEPro64, and TILE-Gx lines.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
Intel Core is a line of multi-core central processing units (CPUs) for midrange, embedded, workstation, high-end and enthusiast computer markets marketed by Intel Corporation. These processors displaced the existing mid- to high-end Pentium processors at the time of their introduction, moving the Pentium to the entry level. Identical or more capable versions of Core processors are also sold as Xeon processors for the server and workstation markets.
Skylake is Intel's codename for its sixth generation Core microprocessor family that was launched on August 5, 2015, succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture. Skylake is a microarchitecture redesign using the same 14 nm manufacturing process technology as its predecessor, serving as a tock in Intel's tick–tock manufacturing and design model. According to Intel, the redesign brings greater CPU and GPU performance and reduced power consumption. Skylake CPUs share their microarchitecture with Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake CPUs.
Renée J. James is an American technology executive, who was formerly the president of Intel. She founded Ampere Computing in October 2017, is currently its Chairman and CEO. She is also an Operating Executive with The Carlyle Group in its Media and Technology practice. James also serves on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, which she formerly chaired. The NSTAC advises the President of the United States. James also serves as an independent director of Citigroup.
Zen is the codename for the first iteration in a family of computer processor microarchitectures of the same name from AMD. It was first used with their Ryzen series of CPUs in February 2017. The first Zen-based preview system was demonstrated at E3 2016, and first substantially detailed at an event hosted a block away from the Intel Developer Forum 2016. The first Zen-based CPUs, codenamed "Summit Ridge", reached the market in early March 2017, Zen-derived Epyc server processors launched in June 2017 and Zen-based APUs arrived in November 2017.
Zen 2 is a computer processor microarchitecture by AMD. It is the successor of AMD's Zen and Zen+ microarchitectures, and is fabricated on the 7 nm MOSFET node from TSMC. The microarchitecture powers the third generation of Ryzen processors, known as Ryzen 3000 for the mainstream desktop chips, Ryzen 4000U/H and Ryzen 5000U for mobile applications, as Threadripper 3000 for high-end desktop systems, and as Ryzen 4000G for accelerated processing units (APUs). The Ryzen 3000 series CPUs were released on 7 July 2019, while the Zen 2-based Epyc server CPUs were released on 7 August 2019. An additional chip, the Ryzen 9 3950X, was released in November 2019.
Ice Lake is Intel's codename for the 10th generation Intel Core mobile and 3rd generation Xeon Scalable server processors based on the Sunny Cove microarchitecture. Ice Lake represents an Architecture step in Intel's process–architecture–optimization model. Produced on the second generation of Intel's 10 nm process, 10 nm+, Ice Lake is Intel's second microarchitecture to be manufactured on the 10 nm process, following the limited launch of Cannon Lake in 2018. However, Intel altered their naming scheme in 2020 for the 10 nm process. In this new naming scheme, Ice Lake's manufacturing process is called simply 10 nm, without any appended pluses.
The Nvidia DGX represents a series of servers and workstations designed by Nvidia, primarily geared towards enhancing deep learning applications through the use of General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). These systems typically come in a rackmount format featuring high-performance x86 server CPUs on the motherboard.
Centriq is a brand of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products designed and marketed by Qualcomm for data centers. The Centriq central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set, with multiple CPU cores in a single chip.
Epyc is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets.
Sapphire Rapids is a codename for Intel's server and workstation processors based on the Golden Cove microarchitecture and produced using Intel 7. It features up to 60 cores and an array of accelerators, and it is the first generation of Intel server and workstation processors to use a chiplet design.
Rocket Lake is Intel's codename for its 11th generation Core microprocessors. Released on March 30, 2021, it is based on the new Cypress Cove microarchitecture, a variant of Sunny Cove backported to Intel's 14 nm process node. Rocket Lake cores contain significantly more transistors than Skylake-derived Comet Lake cores.
Sierra Forest is a codename for Intel's first generation E-core based Xeon server processors. It is fabricated using Intel's Intel 3 process and compatible with the LGA 7529 socket.
AWS Graviton is a family of 64-bit ARM-based CPUs designed by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsidiary Annapurna Labs. The processor family is distinguished by its lower energy use relative to x86-64, static clock rates, and omission of simultaneous multithreading. It was designed to be tightly integrated with AWS servers and datacenters, and is not sold outside Amazon.
The ARM Neoverse is a group of 64-bit ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. The cores are intended for datacenter, edge computing, and high-performance computing use. The group consists of ARM Neoverse V-Series, ARM Neoverse N-Series, and ARM Neoverse E-Series.