New Ampere CPU will provide 40% more performance than any CPU currently on the market

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 16, 2024 – Ampere Computing® today released its annual update on upcoming products and milestones, highlighting the company’s continued innovation and invention around sustainable, power efficient computing for the Cloud and AI. The company also announced that they are working with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to develop a joint solution for AI inferencing using Qualcomm Technologies’ high-performance, low power Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 inference solutions and Ampere CPUs.

Semiconductor industry veteran and Ampere CEO Renee James said the increasing power requirements and energy challenge of AI is bringing Ampere’s silicon design approach around performance and efficiency into focus more than ever. “We started down this path six years ago because it is clear it is the right path,” James said. “Low power used to be synonymous with low performance. Ampere has proven that isn’t true. We have pioneered the efficiency frontier of computing and delivered performance beyond legacy CPUs in an efficient computing envelope.”

James continued to highlight the growing problem of the rapid advance to AI: energy. “The current path is unsustainable. We believe that the future data center infrastructure has to consider how we retrofit existing air-cooled environments with upgraded compute, as well as build environmentally sustainable new data centers that fit the available power on the grid. That is what we enable at Ampere.”

Chief Product Officer Jeff Wittich shared Ampere’s vision for what the company is referring to as “AI Compute”, which incorporates traditional cloud native capabilities all the way to AI. “Our Ampere CPUs can run a range of workloads – from the most popular cloud native applications to AI. This includes AI integrated with traditional cloud native applications, such as data processing, web serving, media delivery, and more.”

James and Wittich also both highlighted the company’s upcoming new AmpereOne® platform by announcing a 12-channel 256 core CPU is ready to go on the N3 process node.

Along with updates on the company’s direction and vision, this year’s update included several news highlights:

• Ampere is working together with Qualcomm Technologies to scale out a joint solution featuring Ampere CPUs and Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra. This solution will tackle LLM inferencing on the industry’s largest generative AI models.
• The expansion of Ampere’s 12-channel platform with the company’s upcoming 256 core AmpereOne® CPU. It will utilize the same air-cooled thermal solutions as the existing 192 core AmpereOne® CPU and deliver more than 40% more performance than any CPU in the market today, without exotic platform designs. The company’s 192-core 12-channel memory platform is still expected later this year.
• An update that Meta’s Llama 3 is now running on Ampere CPUs at Oracle Cloud. Performance data shows that running Llama 3 on the 128 core Ampere® Altra® CPU with no GPU delivers the same performance as an Nvidia A10 GPU paired with an x86 CPU, all while using a third of the power.
• Announced the formation of a UCIe working group as part of the AI Platform Alliance. As part of this, the company said it would build on the flexibility of its CPUs by utilizing the open interface technology to enable it to incorporate other customer IP into future CPUs.
• Provided new details on AmpereOne® performance and OEM and ODM platforms. AmpereOne® continues to carry forward Ampere’s performance per watt leadership, outpacing AMD Genoa by 50% and Bergamo by 15%. For data centers looking to refresh and consolidate old infrastructure to reclaim space, budget, and power, AmpereOne® delivers up to 34% more performance per rack.
• Disclosed that new AmpereOne® OEM and ODM platforms would be shipping within a few months.
• Announced a joint solution with NETINT using the company’s Quadra T1U video processing chips and Ampere CPUs to simultaneously transcode 360 live channels along with real-time subtitling for 40 streams across many languages using OpenAI’s Whisper model.
• In addition to existing features like Memory Tagging, QOS Enforcement and Mesh Congestion Management, the company revealed a new FlexSKU feature, which allows the customers to use the same SKU to address both scale-out and scale-up use cases.

About Ampere

Ampere is a modern semiconductor company designing the future of cloud computing with the world's first Cloud Native Processors. Built for the sustainable Cloud with the highest performance and best performance per watt, Ampere processors accelerate the delivery of all cloud computing applications. Ampere Cloud Native Processors provide industry-leading cloud performance, power efficiency and scalability. For more information visit Ampere Computing.

*For more information on performance claims, see footnotes here.

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