Company:Ampere Computing

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Short description: American fabless semiconductor company
Ampere Computing LLC
AMPERE
TypePrivate
IndustrySemiconductors
Founded2017
FounderRenée James
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Renée James, (Chairman and CEO)
  • Todd Underwood (CFO)
  • Atiq Bajwa (Chief Architect)
ProductsIntegrated circuits
Microprocessors
Cloud-native processor
Number of employees
1100 (2021)
Websiteamperecomputing.com
Footnotes / references
[1]

Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. Ampere also has offices in: Portland, Oregon ; Taipei, Taiwan;[2] Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India;[2] Warsaw, Poland;[3] and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.[4]

History

Ampere Computing was founded in the Fall of 2017 by Renée James,[5] Ex-President of Intel with funding from The Carlyle Group. James acquired a team from MACOM Technology Solutions (formerly AppliedMicro) in addition to several industry hires to start the company.[6][7][8][9] Ampere Computing is an ARM architecture licensee and develops its own server microprocessors.[10] Ampere fabricates its products at TSMC.[11]

In April 2019, Ampere announced its second major investment round, including investment from Arm Holdings and Oracle Corporation.[9] [12] In June 2019, Nvidia announced a partnership with Ampere to bring support for Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).[13][14] In November 2019, Nvidia announced a reference design platform for graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated ARM-based servers including Ampere.[15]

In the first half of 2020, Ampere announced Ampere Altra an 80-core and Ampere Altra Max a 128-core processor without the use of hyper-threading.[16]

In March 2020, the company announced a partnership with Oracle.[17] In September of that year, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and virtual machine instances in early 2021 based on Ampere Altra.[18]

In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups by CRN.[19]

In May 2021, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft.[20] In July of that year, Ampere acquired OnSpecta, an AI technology startup.[21] After the acquisition, the companies were able to demonstrate four times faster acceleration on Ampere-based instances running AI-inference workloads.[citation needed]

In April 2022, Ampere said that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling its intent to go public.[22]

In June 2022, HPE announced their Gen11 ProLiant system would use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors.[23]

In July 2022, Google announced T2A instances using Ampere Altra in the Google cloud and in August 2022 Microsoft announced their instances of Ampere running in Azure.[24]

Products

Ampere develops ARM-based computer processors and CPU cores under their Altra brands.[16] These are used in databases, media encoding, web services, network acceleration, mobile gaming, AI inference processing, and other applications and programs that need to scale.[25]

On February 5, 2018, Ampere announced the eMAG 8180 featuring 32x Skylark cores fabricated on TSMC’s 16FF+ process. It supports a turbo of up to 3.3 GHz with a TDP of 125 W, 8ch 64-bit DDR4, up to 1 TB DDR4 per socket, and 42x PCIe 3.0 Lanes.[26] The Skylark cores were based on AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3.[26] [27] Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking.[28] On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores.[29]

2020

On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80 cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process for hyperscale computing.[30][31][32] It was the first server-grade processor to include 80 cores and the Q80-30 conserves power by running at 161 W in use.[30] The cores are semi-custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications.[33] It supports a frequency of up to 3.3 GHz with TDP of 250 W, 8ch 72-bit DDR4, up to 4 TB DDR4-3200 per socket, 128x PCIe 4.0 Lanes, 1 MB L2 per core and 32 MB SLC.[31][32]

Ampere also announced their roadmap with Ampere Altra Max (2021) in development and AmpereOne (2022) defined.[34]

2021

The 128-core Altra Max was released in 2021 and targeted hyperscale cloud providers.[35] It uses the same server socket and platforms as Ampere Altra, and both products have one thread per core.[36] The Altra Max CPUs provide 128 Arm v8.2+ cores per chip and run up to 3.0 GHz. They also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4.[37]

Also in 2021, Oracle launched its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere Altra processors.[38]

2022

In February 2022, Ampere and Rigetti Computing announced a strategic partnership to create hybrid quantum-classical computers.[39] The companies will combine Ampere’s Altra Max CPUs with Rigetti’s Quantum Processing Units (QPU) in cloud-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.[39]

In April, Microsoft previewed its Azure Virtual Machines running on the Ampere Altra.[25] The VMs run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open source databases, cloud native .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and other processes.[25]

In May, Ampere announced the sampling of AmpereOne CPUs, 5 nanometer chips based on its in-house Ampere-developed core.[40] AmpereOne will add support for DDR5 main memory and PCIe Gen5 peripherals.[40]

On June 28, 2022, HPE became first tier-one server provider to offer compute with optimized cloud-native silicon for service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with new line of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers, using Ampere® Altra® and Ampere® Altra® Max processors, delivering high performance and power efficiency.[citation needed]

2023

During April 2023, Ampere released the Altra developers kit, a IoT Prototype Kit based on Ampere Altra, aimed at cloud developers, available in 32-core, 64-core, and 80-core formats.[41]

Customers

Ampere’s customers include Microsoft Azure,[42] Tencent Cloud, Oracle,[43] ByteDance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),[23] Cloudflare, Equinix, Kingsoft Cloud, Meituan, Scaleway, UCloud, Foxconn Industrial Internet, Gigabyte, Inspur, Cruise,[44] Hetzner, Project Ronin,[45] Wiwynn and Google Cloud Platform[46]

Cruise uses an Ampere Altra variant for its autonomous driving unit. The CPU was selected because of its throughput and low power consumption.[44]

In 2021, Oracle, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance committed to using Ampere’s customized chips, first announced in May. [47] In April 2022, Microsoft previewed Ampere Altra processors in its new Azure D-and E- series virtual machines.[48] The Dpsv5 series is built for Linux enterprise application types, and the Epsv5 series is for memory-intensive Linux workloads.[48] They provide up to 64 vCPUs, include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbps networking, and high-performance local SSD storage.[49]

In 2022, Microsoft’s Ampere Altra-based Azure servers became the first cloud solution provider server to be Arm SystemReady SR certified.[50] The Azure VMs, powered by Altra processors, were also the first to be SystemReady Virtual Environment standard certified. SystemReady defines a set of firmware and hardware standards as a baseline for system development for software developers, original equipment vendors, and chipmakers.[50]

References

  1. ↑ "Former Intel President at Reins in ARM Chip Startup" (in en). 2018-02-05. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/former-intel-president-reins-arm-chip-startup. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Ampere Computing headquarters and office locations". https://craft.co/ampere-computing/locations. 
  3. ↑ "Warsaw" (in en). https://amperecomputing.com/locations/warsaw. 
  4. ↑ "Contact – Ampere Computing" (in en-US). https://amperecomputing.com/contact/. 
  5. ↑ Burt, Jeffrey (2022-03-02). "Designing Chips With The Cloud And Edge In Mind" (in en-US). https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/03/01/designing-chips-with-the-cloud-and-edge-in-mind/. 
  6. ↑ Clarke, Peter (2018-02-05). "Former Intel exec leads high-performance processor startup" (in en-US). https://www.eenewsanalog.com/en/former-intel-exec-leads-high-performance-processor-startup/. 
  7. ↑ Clark, Don (2018-02-05). "She Was No. 2 at Intel. Now She's Taking Aim at the Chip Maker.". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/technology/renee-james-intel-ampere-startup.html. 
  8. ↑ Spencer, Malia (2022-04-12). "Former Intel president Renee James' semiconductor startup company files for an IPO". American City Business Journals. https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2022/04/semiconductor-startup-files-confidentially-for-ipo.html. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Cutress, Ian (2019-04-15). "Ampere Computing: Arm is Now an Investor". AnandTech. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14212/ampere-computing-arm-is-an-investor. 
  10. ↑ "StackPath". https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21238841/electronic-design-arm-serverchip-startup-ampere-computing-preps-for-ipo. 
  11. ↑ "Former Intel president Renee James' semiconductor startup company files for an IPO". https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2022/04/semiconductor-startup-files-confidentially-for-ipo.html. 
  12. ↑ Levy, Ari (2019-09-27). "Oracle discloses $40 million stake in Ampere, a chip start-up founded by former Intel president Renee James" (in en). https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/oracle-disclosed-40-million-investment-in-ampere-run-by-renee-james.html. 
  13. ↑ Cutress, Ian (2019-12-23). "80-Core N1 Next-Gen Ampere, 'QuickSilver': The Anti-Graviton2". AnandTech. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15871/amperes-product-list-80-cores-up-to-33-ghz-at-250-w-128-core-in-q4. 
  14. ↑ Newsroom, NVIDIA. "NVIDIA Brings CUDA to Arm, Enabling New Path to Exascale Supercomputing" (in en). http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-brings-cuda-to-arm-enabling-new-path-to-exascale-supercomputing. 
  15. ↑ Santo, Brian (2019-11-18). "Nvidia Delivers on Promise to Support Arm". EE Times. https://www.eetimes.com/nvidia-delivers-on-promise-to-support-arm/. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Ampere's 128-Core Processor Challenges Intel and AMD in a Cloud-Based Processor Showdown - News" (in en). https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/ampere-altra-max-128-core-processor-challenges-intel-and-amd-in-a-cloud-based-processor-showdown/. 
  17. ↑ Mann, Tobias. "Ampere Targets Intel, AMD With Cloud-First Chips, Oracle Partnership". https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/ampere-targets-intel-amd-with-cloud-first-chips-oracle-partnership/2020/03/. 
  18. ↑ "Ampere's Arm Data Center Chips Come to Oracle Cloud" (in en). 2020-09-30. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/ampere-s-arm-data-center-chips-come-oracle-cloud. 
  19. ↑ Martin, Dylan (2020-11-23). "The 10 Hottest Semiconductor Startups Of 2020". https://www.crn.com/slide-shows/components-peripherals/the-10-hottest-semiconductor-startups-of-2020/2. 
  20. ↑ Trueman, Charlotte (2022-04-05). "Microsoft launches Azure VMs powered by new Ampere Altra Arm-based chips" (in en). https://www.networkworld.com/article/3655956/microsoft-launches-azure-vms-powered-by-new-ampere-altra-arm-based-chips.html. 
  21. ↑ Desk, AIT News (2021-07-29). "Ampere To Acquire OnSpecta To Accelerate AI Inference On Cloud-Native" (in en-US). https://aithority.com/technology/ampere-to-acquire-onspecta-to-accelerate-ai-inference-on-cloud-native-applications/. 
  22. ↑ Nishant, Niket (2022-04-11). "Chipmaker Ampere confidentially files for U.S. IPO". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmaker-ampere-confidentially-files-us-ipo-2022-04-11/. 
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Burke, Steven (2022-06-28). "Processor Power Play: HPE Puts Ampere ARM On ProLiant" (in en). https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/processor-power-play-hpe-puts-ampere-arm-on-proliant. 
  24. ↑ "Why Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud love Ampere Computing's server chips" (in en-US). 2022-08-02. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/silicon/ampere-computing-ipo-microsoft-azure-google-cloud. 
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 "Microsoft Finally Brings ARM-Based VMs to Azure" (in en-US). 2022-04-15. https://thenewstack.io/microsoft-finally-brings-arm-based-vms-to-azure/. 
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 "X-Gene 3 gets a second chance at Ampere with a new 32-core 16 nm ARM processor" (in en-US). 2018-02-05. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/776/x-gene-3-gets-a-second-chance-at-ampere-with-a-new-32-core-16nm-arm-processor/. 
  27. ↑ Cutress, Ian. "Ampere eMAG in the Cloud: 32 Arm Core Instance for $1/hr". https://www.anandtech.com/show/14141/ampere-emag-in-the-cloud-32-arm-core-instance-for-1hr. 
  28. ↑ "Living he Arm Server Dream" (in en). https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-arm. 
  29. ↑ "Ampere Ships First Gen ARM Server Processors" (in en-US). 2018-09-19. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1663/ampere-ships-first-gen-arm-server-processors/. 
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 "Ampere Altra Is First ARM-based 64-bit Server Processor, Packs 80 Cores, Challenging Intel Xeon And AMD EPYC - Appuals.com" (in en-US). https://appuals.com/ampere-altra-first-arm-64-bit/. 
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 Kennedy, Patrick (2020-03-03). "Ampere Altra Launched with 80 Arm Cores for the Cloud" (in en-US). https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-altra-80-arm-cores-for-cloud/. 
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Cutress, Dr Ian. "Next Generation Arm Server: Ampere's Altra 80-core N1 SoC for Hyperscalers against Rome and Xeon". https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n1-soc-for-hyperscalers-against-rome-and-xeon. 
  33. ↑ "Ampere Gears Up to Launch 7 nm, 80-Core Arm Chip for Cloud Data Centers" (in en). 2019-11-22. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/ampere-gears-launch-7nm-80-core-arm-chip-cloud-data-centers. 
  34. ↑ "Ampere Altra Max 128-core server processor available as company lays out 5 nm roadmap" (in en). https://www.zdnet.com/article/ampere-altra-max-128-core-server-processor-available-as-company-lays-out-5-nm-roadmap/. 
  35. ↑ Comment, Sebastian Moss. "Ampere unveils 128 core Altra Max Arm chip" (in en). https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ampere-unveils-128-core-altra-max-arm-chip/. 
  36. ↑ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2020-06-24). "Ampere Reveals "Quicksilver" Altra Lineup, 128-Core "Mystique" Kicker" (in en-US). https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/06/24/ampere-reveals-quicksilver-altra-lineup-128-core-mystique-kicker/. 
  37. ↑ "Ampere, Rigetti to Accelerate Hybrid Quantum Computing in HPC Environments" (in en). 2022-02-16. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-rigetti-to-accelerate-hybrid-quantum-computing-in-hpc-environments. 
  38. ↑ "Oracle Cloud Claims Arm Video Performance Advantage Over x86 Chips" (in en). 2021-06-03. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/oracle/oracle-cloud-claims-arm-video-performance-advantage-over-x86-chips. 
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 Cutress, Dr Ian. "Ampere Goes Quantum: Get Your Qubits in the Cloud". https://www.anandtech.com/show/17255/ampere-goes-quantum-cloudbased-solutions-with-rigetti. 
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2022-05-27). "Ampere Roadmap Has Four Future Arm Server Chips" (in en-US). https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/05/27/ampere-roadmap-has-four-future-arm-server-chips/. 
  41. ↑ "Ampere's new workstation could bring in a whole new dawn for developers" (in en). 2023-04-10. https://www.techradar.com/news/amperes-new-workstation-could-bring-in-a-whole-new-dawn-for-developers. 
  42. ↑ "Now in preview: Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors" (in en). 2022-04-04. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/now-in-preview-azure-virtual-machines-with-ampere-altra-armbased-processors/. 
  43. ↑ "Ampere A1 Compute" (in en). 2021-05-21. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/. 
  44. ↑ 44.0 44.1 Patel, Dylan (2022-06-01). "Is Ampere Computing's Cloud Native Marketing Fluff? – Siryn Ampere One 5nm Architecture, Cost Analysis, and IPO Analysis" (in en-US). https://semianalysis.com/is-ampere-computings-cloud-native-marketing-fluff-siyrn-ampere-one-5nm-architecture-cost-analysis-and-ipo-analysis/. 
  45. ↑ Martin, Dylan. "Ampere: Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm processors are ready" (in en). https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/04/ampere_arm_cloud/. 
  46. ↑ "Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors" (in en). 2022-07-13. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tau-t2a-is-first-compute-engine-vm-on-an-arm-chip. 
  47. ↑ Nellis, Stephen (2021-05-19). "Ampere announces custom computing cores as it courts cloud customers" (in en). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ampere-announces-custom-computing-cores-it-courts-cloud-customers-2021-05-19/. 
  48. ↑ 48.0 48.1 Martin, Dylan. "Microsoft offers Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm processors" (in en). https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/05/microsoft_ampere_azure_vm/. 
  49. ↑ "Microsoft brings Arm support to Azure virtual machines" (in en). https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-brings-arm-support-to-azure-virtual-machines/. 
  50. ↑ 50.0 50.1 Mann, Tobias. "Arm, Microsoft say arch can be trusted with real server work" (in en). https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/arm_datacenter_certification/. 

External links



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