Altra- the “cloud-native” processor

Ampere Computing, a startup said it is shipping an Arm-based, 80-core processor, Altra, a chip that is positioning as the world’s first “cloud-native” processor. It is designed to process the workloads that are typically handled in the cloud, while also drawing significantly less power than the average CPU.

Intel’s processors for data center servers are both powerful and flexible, characteristics that earned the company a thoroughly dominant market share in the data center server market.

Ampere also expects that the power advantage is also likely to become much more relevant relatively soon. Power consumption is already a major constraint in data center design. Ampere quoted figures that data centers are currently using three percent of the world’s electricity, a figure he is said has held steady for a few years. But as the Internet of Things ramps up in earnest, data center consumption is projected to grow to 11 percent of the total by 2030.

Simply scaling up existing power-hungry CPUs is not the answer to address the need for more compute to feed the data explosion, the company said.

Jeff Wittich noted that while each hyperscale data center represents literally hundreds of thousands of processors, the trend toward edge computing is inexorable and processing power is going to end up spreading out all through the network. Altra processors will scale up and down, and therefore will be appropriate for use in just about every network node short of end devices and sensors, including base stations, regional data centers, POPs, and more.

One other selling point, Wittich said, is that Ampere is promising a clear roadmap for successive generations of server processors, with one new generation every year. The next one, code-named Mystique, will drop into the same platform, he said, but with more cores and better performance.

From there, the company will figure it successive improvements, which might come from any number of possible advanced technologies, including the use of DDR5 memory, architecting the processor using chiplets, adding accelerators. “Things that are on accelerators now ought to stay on accelerators for a while,” Wittich said.

Ampere Altra is already shipping samples to customers around the world, including many of the top cloud service providers with both 2-socket and 1-socket platforms available, the company said. The ramp to production is scheduled for sometime in the middle of this year. The company did not identify the customers, but it might be noteworthy that it secured testimonials from Microsoft Azure, Oracle, VMware, Canonical and others.

 “We wanted to go with RISC – RISC is just more efficient. We could have gone RISC-V, or one of the others, but Arm has a huge ecosystem and extensive support, so it’s just a no-brainer. With Arm we can optimize things, instead of spending our time trying to fill in the gaps, which Ampere would have had to do with some other RISC-based core”, said Ampere senior Vice President of products Jeff Wittich.

“Look, in the near term Intel won’t become a minority player; I know the value of incumbency, but there is opportunity to go in and win share. There are new services coming, and we are very forward looking. We’re doing things differently, being cloud-native, building in cloud features, and it all gives us a long-term path,” Wittich concluded.