AMD Launches 64-Bit ARM Chip For Data Centres

AMD has launched a new range of 64-bit ARM chips designed specifically for the data centre, as the chipmaker looks to bolster its presence in the enterprise market.

Officially called the Opteron A1100 family of System-on-Chips (SoCs), the products are aimed at workloads around networking, servers and storage, ie, everything in the data centre.

Enterprise-class

“The AMD Opteron A1100 series is the first time AMD is bringing to market an enterprise-class SOC based on an ARM platform,” AMD told journalists this week.

“In this case, we really think that this is a turning point and a catalyst for accelerating data centre innovation. That innovation is deeply rooted in the concept of choice. Choice is extremely important when you’re looking to solve new problems.”

The AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC is the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. The chips use ARM’s Cortex-A57 processors, with high-speed network and storage connectivity, along with energy efficiency features.

The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC has already been in advanced development with technology partners and customers for several quarters, said AMD, and is available in mass production quantities today.

One of those partners, Red Hat, said that Opteron A1100 SoC represents a “major milestone to the ecosystem” interested in driving converged infrastructure for storage, networking, and compute.

“The ecosystem for ARM in the data centre is approaching an inflection point, and the addition of AMD’s high-performance processor is another strong step forward for customers looking for a data centre-class ARM solution,” said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president, AMD.

“The macro trend of convergence between networking, storage and servers is an important catalyst in this evolution. Customers now have access to 64-bit ARM processors from the only silicon provider that also has decades of experience delivering professional enterprise and embedded products.”

The chips feature eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 4MB shared Level 2 and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache, 2x 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 channels supporting up to 1866 MHz with ECC, along with 2x 10Gb Ethernet network connectivity.

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