14 DAY TRIAL //
When Calxeda failed, many thought that that would be the end of ARM-based server chips for a while, or at least thought that it was a major setback, but Advanced Micro Devices begs to differ.
Well, it might still have been a setback, but AMD is doing a pretty good job of mitigating the effects of the failure of ARM's once greatest promoter on the server front.
ARM launched 64-bit 8-core ARM-based Opteron A1100 server processors last month, and more recently, the Server Base System Architecture Standard that will show system builders and software makers how to go about things.
Software makers will still need a sample or two to actually develop and test their programs though, hence the newest move on AMD's part.
Basically, the company has promised that it will ship Opteron ARMv8 A-Series Seattle processors to software makers by the end of March.
“The needs of the data center are changing. A one-size-fits-all approach typically limits efficiency and results in higher-cost solutions,” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the AMD server business unit.
“The new ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor brings the experience and technology portfolio of an established server processor vendor to the ARM ecosystem and provides the ideal complement to our established AMD Opteron x86 server processors.”
Opteron A1100 SoC has up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit general-purpose processing engines, up to 4 MB shared L2 cache memory, 8 MB shared L3 cache memory, various offload engines (caliber crypto and data compression co-processors) and a server-class dual-channel memory controller (supports up to 128 GB DDR3 or DDR4 ECC memory in unbuffered DIMMs, registered DIMMs or SODIMMs).
AMD intends for Seattle to be used in both normal servers and micro-servers, thanks to the above and the broad integrated I/O capabilities: eight PCI Express 3.0 lanes, two 10Gb/s Ethernet ports, Freedom fabric as well eight Serial ATA-3.0 ports.