New company of former Intel CEO presents 64-bit ARMv8 server chip

Ampere, a new American company led by former Intel CEO Renee James, has announced a 64-bit ARMv8 chip based on a 16nm process. The company focuses on server applications.

A published company brochure indicates that in addition to James, other former Intel employees also hold senior positions at Ampere, as does a former Apple employee who served as senior director of finance at the Cupertino company and now Ampere’s CFO. is. In the announcement of the new company, Ampere says it wants to focus on “memory performance, cost, space and energy consumption,” for example in data centers. James joined Intel in 1987 and rose to chairmanship in 2013, but left the company in 2015.

That company, Ampere, is coming with a 64-bit ARMv8 server chip, which in some ways resembles the Centriq 2400 processor, which Qualcomm announced late last year. The new chip is made by TSMC on the basis of a 16nm process, according to the specifications. The chip has 32 cores and runs at a maximum of 3.3Ghz. There is 32KB of L1 i-cache and the same amount of L1 d-cache per core. Two cores always share 256KB of L2 cache and there is 32MB of shared L3 cache. The TDP is 125W.

The soc supports eight-channel DDR4-2667 memory with ECC and can control a maximum of 1TB of memory divided over 16 dimms. There are eight controllers for 42 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, which can be configured as x16, x8, x4 or x1. Furthermore, the chip is equipped with four SATA600 interfaces, two USB 2.0 connections and one gigabit Ethernet port.

Ampere, which according to TechCrunch has between 300 and 400 employees, has not yet announced the price of its soc. James tells the site that the chips will have built-in protection against Specter and Meltdown when they hit the market later this year.

Update, February 6: As tweaker Squee also points out, the specifications of the chip correspond to the chip announced by Macom in March of last year under the name X-Gene 3. That company acquired Applied Micro at the beginning of 2017 and sold this division again in October to the Carlyle group, which is behind Ampere and of which Renee James is a part.