The chip once known as Seattle has arrived from AMD, the Opteron A1100 Series which is built upon up to eight cores based on a 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57. The chips will have up to 4 MB of shared L2 cache and 8 MB L3 cache with an integrated dual-channel memory controller that supports up to 128 GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory. For connectivity options you will have two 10Gb Ethernet ports, 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 and up to 14 SATA3 devices.
As you can see above the TDPs range from 25W to 32W, perfect for power conscious data centres. The SoftIron Overdrive 3000 systems will use the new A1100 chips and AMD is working with Silver Lining Systems to integrate SLS’ fabric technology for interconnecting systems.
TechARP has posted a number of slides from AMD's presentation or you can head straight over to AMD to get the scoop. You won't see these chips on the desktop but new server chips are great news for AMD's bottom line in the coming year. They also speak well of AMD's continued innovations, using low powered and low cost 64-bit ARM chips, combined with their interconnect technologies opens up a new market for AMD.
Full PR is available after the break.
Sunnyvale, California — January 14, 2016 — AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) marks a major step toward delivering choice and innovation in the datacenter with the launch of the AMD Opteron™ A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), formerly codenamed “Seattle.” Jointly with its software and hardware partners, AMD is accelerating time-to-deployment of ARM®-based systems and driving forward ecosystem support for ARM in the datacenter.
“The ecosystem for ARM in the datacenter is approaching an inflection point, and the addition of AMD’s high-performance processor is another strong step forward for customers looking for a datacenter-class ARM solution,” said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, Enterprise Solutions, AMD. “The macro trend of convergence between networking, storage and servers is an important catalyst in this evolution. Customers now have access to 64-bit ARM processors from the only silicon provider that also has decades of experience delivering professional enterprise and embedded products.”
The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC represents a key milestone for establishing ARM in the datacenter as well. “The AMD Opteron A1100 processor brings a new choice in scalability across network infrastructure and datacenters,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, director of server systems and ecosystems, ARM. “AMD brings recognized expertise in the server and embedded markets, making them an ideal partner to deliver a 64-bit ARM processor with the impressive balance of performance and power-efficiency to address an increasingly diverse set of workloads.”
The AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC is the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. Utilizing ARM Cortex-A57 processors with high-speed network and storage connectivity and outstanding energy efficiency, the AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC delivers a balanced total cost of ownership for storage, Web and networking workloads.
AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC specifications:
- Up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 4MB shared Level 2 and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache
- 2x 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 channels supporting up to 1866 MHz with ECC
- 2x 10Gb Ethernet network connectivity
- 8-lane PCI-Express Gen 3
- 14 SATA-3 ports
The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC is powering enterprise-class systems from SoftIron with its Overdrive 3000 system for developers, as well as an upcoming lineup of software-defined storage solutions taking advantage of the processor’s rich feature set.
“The secret of the AMD Opteron A1100 SoC’s appeal is not just the cores, it’s everything around the cores,” said Norman Fraser, CEO of SoftIron. “If you’ve got an application where you need to move large amounts of data around quickly, you’re going to love it.”
AMD is also collaborating with Silver Lining Systems (SLS) to integrate SLS’ fabric technology in innovative dense server designs featuring the Opteron A1100 Series, targeted at streaming, Web and storage workloads for cloud and hyperscale datacenters. The SLS Fabric Interconnect incorporates a low-latency, energy-efficient 60Gbps switching fabric and is available as a PCI Express expansion card or a standalone ASIC for custom server applications.
“We are very excited about working with AMD to bring power-efficient, fabric-based computing to market,” said Dr. Ping-Kank Hsiung, managing director of Silver Lining Systems. “Combining the efficient AMD Opteron A1100 processor with our unique fabric will help drive down costs and power requirements of hyperscale computing and storage.”
In addition to silicon innovation, AMD has been instrumental in supporting the 64-bit ARM software ecosystem, a critical component to any new processor, and has been working closely with Enterprise Linux leaders Red Hat and SUSE on operating system and application support.
“Red Hat and AMD share a vision of building an open, standards-based software ecosystem for highly converged designs based on 64-bit ARM architecture. As one of the first participants in Red Hat's ARM Partner Early Access Program, AMD has been instrumental in the testing and porting of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform to 64-bit ARM architecture,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage, Red Hat. “The arrival of the AMD Opteron A1100 SoC represents a major milestone to the ecosystem interested in driving converged infrastructure for storage, networking and compute.”
The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC has been in advanced development with technology partners and customers for several quarters and is available in mass production quantities today.
Are they no longer planning a
Are they no longer planning a hybrid x86 and arm processor?
Not so much, Project
Not so much, Project Skybridge is essentially hibernating right now but if HSA takes off it may come back in some form or another.
They were never planning a
They were never planning a hybrid x86 and ARM processor, SkyBridge was about making AMD’s x86, and Arm based chips fit the same socket on AMD’s motherboards. It was about having one motherboard that could have an x86 or an ARM based APU/CPU able to be swapped out without changing the motherboard, or the motherboard’s owner not having to purchase separate motherboards if they wanted x86, or ARM based APU’s from AMD to configure servers for different server jobs. AMD was going to have pin compatible ARM and x86 based APUs but not any hybrid APUs that could run both ISAs.
AMD already puts its Trustzone ARM based core/s on some of its x86 based APU SKUs, but the ARM Trustzone processor on AMD’s x86 core is just there for software verification/security functionality and runs in its own secure hardware/software/firmware environment.
25w for 4 core at 1.7ghz
32w
25w for 4 core at 1.7ghz
32w for 8 core at 2.0ghz
7w to double the number of core and raise all 8 core speed by 20%…
This tell us that a core use ~1.5w under max load
So the SoC power is : 25w – 4*1.5 = 19w
People at Anand and Tech report have been slamming AMD for the TDP comparing to Intel Atom and xeon D, but they fail to notice the 14 build in sata 3 port and the dual 10gige ports.
Those $200 have less then half the sata port, and no network, let alone dual 10gige.
Anyways, I would live to see full board power usage before writing off AMD ARM server effort.
Also, AMD can jump to 14nm with ease if customers see a benefit.
It will be interesting to see
It will be interesting to see how low the power consumption can go with having so much on one die. It will save a lot of power to have the dual 10 Gb ethernet and SATA all on the same die. External interfaces burn a lot of power unnecessarily. Do the SATA ports support RAID?
So Seattle SKUs will offered
So Seattle SKUs will offered for a short time before the K12 arrives, but AMD will continue to support the Seattle server variants for 10 years like most of its server SKUs! AMD will be moving to its Custom K12 cores, and away from the refrence design ARM based A57 cores, so K12 based server SKUs are coming in 2017! AMD has at least had a chance to get its ARM software stack in order before K12 arrives with this Seattle project, so the Transition to K12 based SKUs when they arrive will be much eaiser on the software side of things.
That is just there for
That is just there for software verification/security functionality and runs in its own secure hardware/software/firmware environment. It will be interesting to see how low the power consumption medion akoya s6212t akku can go with having so much on one die. It will save a lot of power to have the dual 10 Gb ethernet and SATA all on the same die.
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