AMD Releases Its First ARM Socs for Data Centers
AMD released its ARM socs for data centers announced in early 2014 on Thursday. The AMD Opteron A1100 features up to eight Cortex A57 cores and includes integrated support for two 10Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces.
The Opteron A1100 socs are included in SoftIron’s Overdrive 3000 and products from Beaconworks, Caswell, Silverlining and 96 Boards Enterprise. In the software field, AMD has partnered with Red Hat, Suse and Linaro to optimize software for the Opterons. Availability was a long time coming: AMD announced the Opteron A1100 line in early 2014 and the chips should have been released that year.
However, AMD was forced to scale back its ARM activities and, among other things, Project Skybridge was scrapped: for this project AMD wanted to combine ARM-A57 cores with x86 cores. The Opteron A1100 socs should then have been released on the market in the second half of 2015, but this deadline was not met either. The first three models have now appeared.
The chips come in a BGA package of 27x27mm and there will be a model with four ARM A57 cores and two versions with eight cores. All models have 8MB L3 cache and support dual channel DDR3 and DDR4 memory with ecc. In terms of I/O, there is support for PCI-E 3.0 x8, up to fourteen SATA600 interfaces and two 10Gbit/s ports. In addition, a co-processor for cryptographic calculations and secureboot is integrated.
AMD focuses with the socs mainly on network, storage, web server and software development applications. The Opteron A1100 socs have to compete with the lower end of Intel’s Xeon line, while Qualcomm, among others, is also developing ARM socs for data center applications.
| A1170 | 32W | 8 | 4MB | 8MB | 2GHz | 1600 | 1866 | 0°C-80°C | Yes |
| A1150 | 32W | 8 | 4MB | 8MB | 1.7GHz | 1600 | 1866 | 0°C-80°C | Yes |
| A1120 | 25W | 4 | 2MB | 8MB | 1.7GHz | 1600 | 1866 | 0°C-80°C | Yes |