AMD started sampling of First ARM-Based Opteron Server Chip

At the Open Compute Summit, held in San Jose, AMD’s General Manager of its Server Business Unit Andrew Feldman took the veil off of the company’s upcoming Opteron A1100 series processors – one of the most important server announcements to come out of AMD in perhaps the past five years.

Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's server business unit, said the AMD Opteron A1100 series, codenamed "Seattle," not only signals the chipmaker's commitment to becoming the "leader in ARM CPUs for servers" but the dawn of new era for data management.
"This is not a one-generation process," he said. "There will be generation after generation after generation and each will improve and be more closely tied to the software and hardware enclosure it lives in."

The biggest thing to set the Opteron A1100 series apart from the others is that they’re based on ARM’s ARMv8 architecture, rather than the well-established x86 architecture. A couple of years ago, even thinking of using an ARM CPU in a server might have had you sent to a doctor for evaluation, but this is 2014, and ARM’s current flagship – believe it or not - is capable of handling typical server workloads.

The exact core to be used in AMD’s A1100 is ARM’s Cortex A57, which sports a 64-bit design. With AMD’s magic sprinkled on top, the A1100 will include a server-class memory controller, 8x PCIe Gen 3 lanes, dual 10Gbps Ethernet ports, and 8x SATA 6Gbps ports. A1100 will be available in both 4 and 8-core designs.

The company's strategy will continue later this quarter when Seattle begins sampling, as will a development platform designed to make it easier for programmers to design software for AMD's ARM-based platform.

"We are racing ahead in the ARM community," Feldman said. "We've passed youth and moved to the gangly adolescent phase for software" in the ARM ecosystem.

He added that ARM CPUs will play a "monstrous role" in tomorrow's datacenters, perhaps commanding a quarter of the server market by 2019.