Ampere launches AmpereOne CPU with 192 cores for the data center

Ampere Computing has announced a new AmpereOne processor family with up to 192 single-threaded Ampere cores.

This is Ampere’s first product based on the company’s new custom core, built from the ground up and leveraging the company’s internal intellectual property.

CEO Renee James, who founded Ampere Computing to provide a modern alternative to the industry with processors specifically designed for both efficiency and performance in the cloud, said in a statement that a fundamental shift was taking place that required a new approach.

“Every few decades of computing, a drive application or use of performance has emerged that sets a new bar for what is required for performance,” said James. “Current driving use is AI and connected everything in conjunction with our continued use and desire for streaming media. We can’t continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center. At Ampere, we design our products to maximize performance with sustainable power, so we can continue to drive the future of the industry.”

In an interview with VentureBeat, Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer at Ampere, said data centers today contribute about 3% of the world’s carbon emissions. That’s why Ampere focuses on delivering better per-rack performance and efficiency, as well as good AI performance.

“We’re increasingly seeing our customers realize that even if they’re willing to do it, the amount of available computing power they have is really limited by the amount of total power available,” said Wittich. “So ultimately delivering more performance requires efficiency.”

Ampere came out stealth in 2018. In 2020, Ampere came out with an 80 core processor and then added a 128 core processor. With 192 Arm-based cores, the company continues to deliver more performance and less power, Wittich said.

Ampere created the cloud-native processor category with its Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors that have been on the market since 2020. And the company has remained intensely focused on delivering on a commitment to deliver a predictable and rapid cadence of product performance and efficiency.

“These are our own Ampere custom cores. So we built it completely from the ground up. This is what we’ve been doing for the past few years, building these custom cores,” Wittich said. “That makes it possible to pack more cores, deliver more performance and efficiency.”

Today, the company introduced its newest family of Ampere-based products, AmpereOne, to take more efficient, performance-oriented computers further than before.

With AmpereOne, the company broadens its portfolio while delivering further gains in performance, scalability and efficiency. Alta and Altra Max continue to serve the cloud, along with other key segments that require the highest performance at the lowest power.

“AmpereOne is about more. More cores, more IO, more memory, more performance, more cloud features,” said Wittich. “With our Ampere Custom Cloud Native Cores, this is the next step in breaking the limitations of legacy computing. No other CPU comes close. It’s about cloud scale with the maximum performance per rack.”

Ampere One is built from the ground up with 192 custom-designed Ampere cores, large cloud-optimized private caches, and new cloud features targeting fast-growing cloud usage, such as AI. These features, such as Mesh Congestion Management, Fine-Grained Power Management, and Memory Tagging, also improve performance consistency, manageability, and security for high-performance, multi-user, high-performance environments such as the cloud. The entire platform has been scaled with the addition of eight channels of DDR5 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen5 IO. The processor is manufactured on the 5nm process node.

“The result of all this innovation is the most efficient and best performing core in the industry for cloud workloads,” said Wittich. “Ampere One offers Ampere’s customers the highest overall performance, scalability and density for Cloud Native workloads,” he said, adding that Ampere’s Cloud Native Processors provide a performance advantage over two competing CPUs for AI inference due to their lower latency and higher throughput. .

With the addition of the AmpereOne product family, Ampere is expanding its product portfolio to meet all cloud-native computing needs – from the lowest power and most limited to the highest customer requirements. Confidence in this product portfolio is evidenced by Ampere’s growing customer base, which includes leading CSPs such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as leading OEMs such as HPE and Supermicro.

Wittich said Ampere has more cores per CPU than AMD or Intel. And it uses chiplet technology, or multiple dies per processor, with chiplets for the processor, I/O, and memory.

Wittich said the processor can handle all sorts of tasks. The company showed off generative AI models like Stable Diffusion running on its processors at 2.3 times more frames per second than rival Genoa processors. On recommendation applications, it can process more than two times more queries per second than Genoa, Wittich said.

Ampere showed logos for 33 companies that use or collaborate with Ampere processors in the field of software. Wittich said the company has an edge in making inferences at scale for AI applications. Other solutions use much more power, he said.

James said there was a fundamental architectural shift taking place that makes more performance with greater efficiency the new necessity.

“It is time for us as an industry to seize the moment and embrace change. Our future growth as an industry depends on it,” she said. “The cloud has ushered in a whole new world and approach to software development. Isn’t it about time the microprocessor did the same?”

The need for this architectural shift is reinforced by the exponential growth of computers, they
said, which has resulted in competition for power resources between data centers and critical
commercial and residential developments. “Sustainability is no longer just part of an ESG effort — it is critical to all future computing growth.”

AmpereOne starts at 136 and goes all the way up to 192 cores. The cores are single-threaded cores, as Ampere strongly believes that single-threaded cores are the best way to deliver consistent performance in the cloud.

“Providing multiple threads per core introduces security issues and creates a lot of noisy neighbor problems,” Wittich said. “We want people to run these processors at very high utilization. We have 192 cores, and we want you to use all 192 cores. That makes for better efficiency.”