14 DAY TRIAL // AMD made history when it released the “Seattle” processor, since it was its first 64-bit ARM-based processor made for servers and one of the first 64-bit ARM chips, period. It also happened to be a much stronger chip than what the ARM architecture is known for.
ARM processors are the ones that rule the mobile phone and tablet markets, thanks to their high energy efficiency compared to Intel's and AMD's x86 architecture.
Over the past half a decade, however, the ARM and x86 architectures have tried to carve out a piece of the other's turf, with limited success.
ARM actually did better, and AMD's endorsement has a lot to do with that, because it brought the ARM architecture into the server market. Micro-server market for now, but like any chip architecture, the ARM technology will scale with time.
The codename “Seattle” is attached to ARM Cortex-A57 processors. Commercially, the chips are known as the Opteron A1100 series.
It's not quite easy to move from x86-based infrastructures to ARM servers though, so Advanced Micro Devices has decided to help prospective business/enterprise customers along.
Which brings us to the matter at hand: the Sunnyvale, California-based company has released the AMD Opteron A1100-Series developer kit. Given the reluctance of other outfits to offer 64-bit ARM server hardware with complete ARMv8 instruction set support, AMD will probably have monopoly for a while.
The kit will provide system builders and network overseers with all the hardware needed to build an ARMv8-based server and with the instructions to fully exploit the better efficiency compared to x86.
The AMD Opteron A1100-Series development kit includes a micro-ATX motherboard, two 16 GB DDR3 DIMMs, PCI Express connectors (x8 or two x4), eight SATA ports, UEFI BIOS, Linux operating system software, drivers, Apache web server, MySQL database engine, and PHP scripting language, plus Java 7 and Java 8, among other things.
As for the chips themselves, the AMD Opteron A1100 CPUs have 4 to 8 ARM Cortex-A57 cores, shared L2 cache of up to 4 MB, up to 8 MB L3 cache, and several interface controllers. The controllers provide, respectively, eight PCI Express 3.0 lanes, eight SATA III ports (SATA 6.0 Gbps), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMMs memory modules (DDR3 and DDR4 supports, with 3CC up to 1,866 MT/s).
Security and data compression is added to the mix via ARM TrustZone technology, plus Crypto and data compression co-processors. The overall kit price is of $2,999 / €2,238.
