HPE equips ProLiant servers with Ampere Altra soc with 128 Arm cores

HPE announces servers that it will equip with Altra processors from the company Ampere. They are the first servers from a major manufacturer to appear with these Arm-based socs with up to 128 cores.

HPE announces the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11, a 1U server in the new HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 series that the company is equipping with Ampere Altra chips. The servers have a single socket for an Ampere Altra with up to 80 cores or an Ampere Altra Max soc available with up to 128 cores.

HPE focuses with the systems on companies that offer Internet services, such as media streaming, social platforms, e-commerce and various as-a-service services such as software-as-a-service. In these types of companies, there is a need for a large amount of less powerful cores.

The ProLiant RL Gen11 servers can accommodate up to sixteen DIMMs for up to 4TB of RAM per system. Up to three PCIe 4.0 expansion slots are provided, in addition to two OCP NIC 3.0 connectors. The systems also offer space for ten NVMe SSDs with an SFF form factor.

Ampere announced its Altra socs in 2020. These are built around Arm’s Neoverse N1 cores, which are based on the Armv8.2 architecture. For example, the Altra Max has up to 128 such cores, with a clock speed of 3GHz. The chip has a TDP of 250W and TSMC makes it using a 7nm process.

HPE will launch the ProLiant RL300 Gen11 in the third quarter of this year.