14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has steadily been laying off the pressure on the high-end x86 processor market, seemingly leaving it all to Intel, but now it's confirmed that it was all part of a plan. A plan involving the ARM architecture that is.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company has glibly informed the world that, come 2014, it will release 64-bit ARM-based Opteron central processing units, marking the biggest marketing disruption since x86 64-bit Opteron CPUs debuted back in 2003.
Codenamed Seattle, it will rely on the ARMv8 architecture and feature four or eight cores, as well as 10GB/sec of Ethernet connectivity and support its new “Freedom Fabric” protocol.
Furthermore, the processors will support up to 128 GB of ECC memory (Error Correcting Code).
The Opteron CPUs will power servers running Linux 3.7 or higher. There's actually a downloadable, bootable Ubuntu distribution available for download already.
Data centers and micro servers will be the primary target of the 64-bit ARMv8 Opteron chips.