Ampere introduces server processors with up to 192 self-designed Arm cores

Ampere introduces its next generation of server processors. The AmpereOne series uses Arm cores designed by Ampere for the first time. The company supplies AmpereOne processors with up to 192 cores. The CPUs support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

With the AmpereOne series Ampere no longer uses Arm’s Neoverse cores. Instead, the processors have custom cores. These cores still use the Arm instruction set architecture, but were developed by Ampere itself. The company does not speak concretely about ipc improvements compared to the previous generation, but says to TechCrunch that the performance per watt is comparable to current Ampere Altra processors.

The company is also increasing the number of cores. Previous Ampere server processors shipped with up to 128 cores. The AmpereOne CPUs will be available with 136 to 192 cores. The amount of private L2 cache has also been doubled to 2MB per core. The CPUs are produced on a 5nm process from TSMC. Ampere also equips its new processors with DDR5 support with eight memory channels per socket. The CPUs also have 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The current Ampere Altra chips only support DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.

Ampere publishes some server benchmarks for its AmpereOne processors, writes ServeTheHome, among others. The company says, among other things, that its CPU achieved up to 2.3x as many frames per second in a test as an AMD EPYC 9654 CPU in Stable Diffusion. However, the company used an AmpereOne CPU with 160 cores and 512GB DDR5 memory for this. The AMD system only had 256GB of memory, according to the footnotes.

It is not known what the different AmpereOne models will cost. The existing Altra chips will continue to be available, although Ampere will not release any new chips in this series in the future. Future chips from the company will all have proprietary cores, Ampere CPO Jeff Wittich told TechCrunch.