Ampere starts delivery of server processor with 32 Arm cores

Chip company Ampere makes its first eMAG processors available for server applications. It concerns 64-bit chips with 32 and 16 Armv8 cores, which have to compete with Intel’s Xeon chips.

Ampere’s eMAG chips mainly rely on their relatively low price in combination with extensive I/O options. The processors have a clock speed of up to 3.3GHz, contain eight memory controllers for DDR4-2667, offer 32MB L3 cache, support up to 42 PCI-e 3.0 lanes and have a TDP of 125W. TSMC makes the chips using its 16nm process. The 32-core version has a suggested retail price of $850, while the 16-core variant costs $550.

No performance benchmarks have been published yet, so it is not known which Xeon the eMAG chips have to compete with. In any case, a disadvantage of the models is that they are single socket chips. Ampere does promise that successors will appear next year that are multi-socket. In addition, those chips are produced at 7nm instead of 16nm, with probably advantages in terms of consumption.

Ampere’s CEO is former Intel CEO Renee James. The company announced its chip design early this year, after which it turned out that the design matched that of Macom’s X-Gene 3, shown a year earlier, which came into the hands of the same investor as Ampere.

Arm chips have long been a promise to compete with the Xeons, but the market is less lucrative than previously thought, for example, forcing Qualcomm to put its plans for Arm server chips on the back burner.