Ampere in the News

SoftBank Group announced on Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a chip designer founded by former Intel executive Renee James, through a $6.5 billion all-cash deal as a strategic move to broaden its investment in AI infrastructure.

SoftBank Group Corp. late today confirmed that it will buy the chipmaker Ampere Computing LLC in a deal that’s valued at $6.5 billion.

Ampere is adding the new 512-core AmpereOne Aurora processor to its roadmap, the company announced today. This new chip has custom Arm cores and a custom mesh and die-to-die interconnect. It also supports HBM memory and Ampere's next-gen AI acceleration blocks, but the company hasn't yet announced the specific launch timing.

Today, Ampere’s annual video includes a few big updates, including a 256-core 3nm Arm server CPU with 12-channel DDR5 memory slated for 2025. It sounds like the Ampere AmpereOne generation is already in the planning phases and slated for 2026.

Ampere Computing and French cloud operator Scaleway are pushing Arm-based servers as a more cost-efficient way of operating AI-based services, especially when it comes to inferencing. … At the ai-PULSE conference in Paris, the two companies announced availability of cost-optimized COP-Arm instances operated by Scaleway using servers based on Ampere's Altra family of Arm-based datacenter processors

Inferencing requires matrix multiplication—brute-force processing that Ampere says its processors perform well—and AI inference is the workload where the company is seeing the most growth.

Oracle (ORCL.N), said on Tuesday that it would use Ampere Computing's flagship processor chips in its cloud computing service, in a boost to the chip company that has filed for an initial public offering.

In a big announcement this morning, Ampere AmpereOne has its first cloud instance at Google. Today, the companies announced that the Google C3A instances are being powered by AmpereOne chips a big step for both companies.

The new AmpereOne chip, featuring up to 192 cores and a custom ARM-compatible design, is aimed at cloud providers and enterprises who build their own private clouds.

Over the course of the last few years, thanks to its Altra and Altra Max processors, Ampere made a name for itself as one of the premier suppliers of Arm-based chips to large cloud services providers. These chips were also based on Arm-designed cores, though. Today, the company is officially launching the AmpereOne family, its first set of processors with custom-designed chips highly optimized for data center use cases.

This is precisely the idea that Ampere Computing was founded upon way back in early 2018, and after five long years of development, the company is bringing a super-dense chip to market based on its own Arm core design, which we have dubbed A1 and of which 192 of them are being plunked down into single chiplet inside the now-shipping “Siryn” AmpereOne processor that we and the market have been anticipating for years.

The Supermicro ARS-210ME-FNR is a 2U edge/ telco form factor that combines a short-depth chassis with the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 128-core Arm Neoverse-N1 processor. Let us take a look at this unique system.

Coming on the same day as Ubuntu 22.10, Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.2 as the latest version of this popular BSD operating system. Most notable with OpenBSD 7.2 is now supporting Ampere Altra Arm server processors. After the great success of Ampere Altra on Linux and the success of Altra / Altra Max in the marketplace with being picked up by various public cloud service providers and other organizations, the various BSDs have been working on on Ampere Altra support.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Virtual Machines featuring Ampere Altra processors, in 10 Azure regions globally. This marks another significant triumph for Ampere, which has landed wins with numerous leaders in the cloud space, including Google, Cloudflare, Tencent, and Oracle to name just a few.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm–based processor.

HPE becomes the first major server vendor to ship servers powered by the Arm-based Altra and Altra Max by Ampere.

Its 'cloud native' chips are popular with the hyperscalers and could become a hit in the wider enterprise market.

HPE becomes first tier-one server provider to offer compute with optimized cloud-native silicon for service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development. New line of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers, using Ampere® Altra® and Ampere® Altra® Max processors, delivering high performance and power efficiency.

The lineup of Ampere Altra Arm-based virtual machines includes the Dps v5, Dpds v5, Dpls v5, Dplds v5, Eps v5 and Epds v5 series, which range from 2 to 64 CPUs and 4 to 208 GiBs of memory, with a number of storage options.

Now the company is taking the next step by moving to Arm-compatible CPU cores that it designed in house beginning with its next new processor scheduled to be introduced in 2022. In addition, the company has committed to introducing a new product on an annual cadence going forward with improved CPU cores each year.

Microsoft has announced the public preview of its new Azure virtual machines powered by the Arm-based Ampere Altra server processors. The VM series includes the general-purpose Dpsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5 virtual machines, which Microsoft claims can deliver up to 50% better price-performance than comparable IBM x86-based VMs.

In the bid to become the cloud service to rule them all, Microsoft Azure has introduced a new Arm-based virtual machine in preview, based on Ampere Altra chips.

Microsoft is getting into the Arm server chip game with a new service from its Azure cloud-computing unit.

On Monday, the company launched a preview of virtual machines (VMs) on its Azure cloud service powered by Arm-based server CPUs from startup Ampere, ratcheting up the pressure on AMD and Intel in the data-center domain.

Microsoft Corp. said today it’s making its first-ever batch of Azure virtual machines powered by Ampere Computing LLC’s Arm-based Altra server chips available in preview.

Hetzner Online is one of the first European web hosting companies to place its trust in the expertise of the CPU manufacturer Ampere Computing. As part of this new cooperation, Hetzner is currently developing innovative ARM-based products to meet the market’s growing demand for modern IT infrastructure.

In this instance, we recently spoke with a quantum computing company called Rigetti, who are working with Ampere Computing who make Arm-based cloud processors called Altra, who are planning to introduce a hybrid quantum/classical solution for the cloud in 2023.

Ampere Computing Llc, founded by former Intel Corp President Renee James, said on Wednesday it will release a processor next year featuring its own custom-designed computing cores, joining a small group of custom chip companies that includes Apple Inc.

Ampere has had a big year with the launch of two Altra server processors that have outgunned rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in some key server features. Now the company plans to race ahead with even more powerful chips in the next couple of years, CEO Renee James told VentureBeat in an interview.

Ampere, the server startup that is betting on bringing Arm-based chips to the data center and edge, is hosting its annual media day today. With the 80-core Altra and 128-core Altra Max, the company already offers a platform that can rival and outperform those of competitors like Intel and AMD in many common scenarios — and Altra Max is now in production and shipping.

Ampere this morning is updating the market on some of its progress. There appears to be a lot happening with the company, and we have certainly been hearing more about them from customers over the past few quarters. As part of an event we were pre-briefed on, the company is announcing a number of new details, some are going to be a big surprise. Perhaps the biggest is in the headline, that the company is designing its own custom cores.

Since launching its first data center chip, the 80-core Ampere Altra, last year, the company has had several high-profile wins including Cloudflare, Equinix, and Oracle. Today, the company added Microsoft to its list of customers, as the cloud giant plans to use Altra to meet its lofty 2030 carbon-neutrality goals, said Jeff Wittich, chief product officer at Ampere.

Ampere Computing is on a roll. The company’s 80-core Altra processor (released in 2020) is racking up customers, several of which Ampere has finally made public. Its 128-core Altra Max is sampling now, and it’s just about as fast as Ampere suggested it would be. In an interview with EE Times, CEO Renee James called it “just a screamer.” The Altra Max’s successor (still unnamed) is on schedule to sample in 2022.

Startup aims to make a dent in Intel’s grip on server chips Companies are racing to build new systems to run AI software

Today we’re covering some news of the more unusual type, and that is a roadmap update from Ampere, and having a closer look what the company is planning in terms of architectural and microarchitectural choices of their upcoming next-generation server CPUs in 2022 and onwards.

For deep learning workloads like measured by TNN, the Ampere Altra 2P did manage to come successfully in front of the EPYC 7742 2P and Xeon Platinum 8280 2P servers. Not only was the Ampere Altra Q80-33 performing the best, but the combined 2P CPU power consumption was much lower than the Intel and AMD competition.

Over 28 years at the giant computer chip maker Intel, Renée James climbed to its No. 2 position, becoming one of Silicon Valley’s prominent female leaders.

Now she is taking aim at Intel’s most lucrative business