It’s been a busy fall already for the Ampere team. From the OCP Global Summit to Oracle CloudWorld to Microsoft Ignite, our leadership Cloud Native Processors have been in the spotlight over the past two weeks. Personally, it has been amazing to connect and collaborate with so many customers, partners, and colleagues in person.

“Sustainability at the Core” was a key theme across all these events. The global need to reduce our power, water, and carbon footprint is clear, and our efficient cloud-first approach is a game changer in creating green data centers. Here are a few highlights from these shows.

OCP Global Summit

“Empowering Open” was this year’s theme in San Jose at the OCP Global Summit, lining up perfectly with the innovations that we’re sharing with the OCP community in order to broadly enable Cloud Native Platforms from top to bottom.

During my keynote presentation, I highlighted the growing industry challenge to reduce data center power consumption. By adopting Ampere Cloud Native Processors, data centers can save 2-3x power and space, dramatically reducing their carbon footprint. In addition to our contribution last year of out Mt. Jade server hardware and firmware, I announced our latest OCP contribution: Mt. Mitchell, our next-generation DDR5 and PCIe Gen5 enabled Cloud Native Platform, currently being is use by key partners and customers.

Jayesh Shah, Alan Chang of Inspur, and Leigh Chen provided further details of the Mt. Mitchell motherboard design in their presentation the next day. It supports the OCP3.0 NIC and DC-SCM 1.0, which was just announced last year. These are the first pieces in a more modular server design that will drive a faster path to innovation as well as standardization across many platforms, starting with server management, security, and control.

Just like last year, there were dozens of Ampere platforms on display across the expo hall both within our own booth as well as with numerous partners. From dense compute to storage to AI workloads, there are Ampere server configurations to meet the spectrum of cloud needs. Sean Varley and Jayesh Shah presented an overview of these platforms in their show floor talk.

In particular, with HPE, Sean demonstrated the HPE ProLiant RL300, their first Gen11 platform, which combines the high performance, efficiency, and predictability of Ampere Cloud Native Processors with open computing technologies such as OpenBMC FW and the OCP3.0 NIC. This solution delivers one of the densest and most sustainable compute platforms on the market today. This server was also featured in the OCP Experience Center.

Peter Pouliot of Ampere and Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud from Arm discussed the value of Arm SystemReady, which certifies that operating systems and subsequent layers of software just work out of the box. We currently have 17 Ampere Altra and Altra Max platforms certified as SystemReady SR, as well as 3 cloud instances certified with SystemReady VE, those from Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The next step is the introduction of the OCP Arm SystemReady Experience Center using Ampere-based servers. This will allow OEMs, ODMs, and CSPs to certify their platform as SystemReady and to drive more OCP Accepted and OCP Inspired server hardware.

Videos from these presentations can be viewed here.

Oracle CloudWorld

Meanwhile in Las Vegas, at Oracle CloudWorld, we hosted a hackathon with Oracle. Developers used the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Ampere AI accelerated TensorFlow or PyTorch frameworks to deploy a website with chatbot functionality. Participants received swag bags and the winner received an ADLINK Ampere Altra Developer Platform after some friendly competition!

I also joined Greg Pavlik and Zuban Irani on stage where we discussed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services for compute, storage and networking that help accelerate time to market, reduce risk and scale to meet demand. I highlighted the ability to have unlimited cores with OCI Ampere A1 so that Cloud Native workloads are not constrained, delivering the industry’s most tunable, flexible compute.

At JavaOne, Naren Nayak shared the performance improvements that the JDK8 Enterprise Performance Pack on the OCI Ampere compute platform provides for popular cloud applications such as Spark, Cassandra, and enterprise-class Java benchmarks. The Enterprise Performance Pack is a simple drop-in replacement that can result in 46% better price-performance compared to the most popular x86 instances on OCI.

Partners also demonstrated the performance and efficiency of Oracle Cloud A1 instances featuring Ampere Cloud Native Processors. For example, Matoha reduced their AI model training time by 30% and cost by 75% by moving to OCI Ampere A1. And Plesk brought more than 1,000 customers on board in the first quarter after launching Ampere Altra-based OCI for its WebOps platform, their fastest product ramp ever. They selected us because Ampere Altra is climate friendly and offers better price/performance than the alternatives.

We also delivered several other presentations on topics including the Ampere Developer Program, Ampere Altra in use for real world social-network services, and how to maximize value with OCI Ampere A1 across various workloads.

Visit here for more information on these presentations.

Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, kicked off Microsoft Ignite by talking about modernizing your infrastructure from the ground up with Azure VMs featuring Ampere Altra processors. Throughout the virtual conference, our performance experts shared insights and tips on optimizing performance and efficiency across many workloads such as databases, video services, web services, AI, and more.

Visit here to view session videos.

The Momentum Will Continue It has been an exciting two weeks and the prevalence of our Cloud Native Processors throughout the industry is very visible. Its clear that the solution to a high performance and sustainable cloud starts with Ampere at the core.

We’re not slowing down. We look forward to seeing you at future events such as the Arm Dev Summit, KubeCon and the HTAP Summit later this fall. We’ll be demonstrating additional use cases with even more partners as the industry embraces the benefits of deploying a modern Cloud Native Platform for better performance and power efficiency that also benefits our planet!