Ampere Computing Leads In Cloud Deployments As The Only Arm-Based Merchant Cloud Computing Platform

Wednesday, September 14th Arm held a press conference to announce the latest updates to the roadmap for its server CPUs, which the company calls “Neoverse” cores. The key revelation at the press conference was the V2 core (code-named Demeter), which will power Nvidia’s “Grace” CPU for high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads.

The Arm Neoverse V, N, and E-series cores target three different performance and power tradeoffs. V-cores deliver higher performance per core at higher power and larger die area. E-cores are designed to be significantly more power and die space efficient. The N-cores fall between the other two types of cores with a balance of performance, scale and power. Arm updated the roadmaps for the three types of Neoverse CPU cores with support for the latest platform technologies: PCIe (gen 5 and 6), CXL (2.0 and 3.0), and DDR5 memory.

Ampere Computing Leads The Way

Arm discussed several new key customer design wins – including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud – but, these companies all use Ampere Altra products. Ampere Computing is the only CPU company presently shipping merchant (independent) Arm server chips for cloud service providers.

For those not familiar with the company, it’s a privately held start up led by Founder, Chairman, and CEO Renée J. James. She founded the company in 2017 after serving as President of Intel. She was also the first female General Manager of an Intel business unit and the company’s first woman Executive Vice President. She founded the company with the mission to fill the gap in cloud computing and built a team that included veterans from Intel, Sun Micro, and other leading companies.

Ampere Computing has launched two products over the last two years: the 80-core Ampere Altra in 2020 and the 128-core Ampere Altra Max in 2021. The company has already sampled its newest product, the AmpereOne, to customers earlier this year. While Ampere Computing used Arm’s Neoverse N1 cores for its Altra line to get to market faster, the company’s real goal was to develop its own CPU cores using only an Arm ISA license.

The Ampere Altra family has proven that it is possible to instantiate more CPU cores per socket and still achieve lower power consumption using leading-edge 7nm process technology compared with competing server processor cores. This is a very appealing value proposition for cloud service providers as they can run more instances per rack and per Watt. The Ampere Altra Max packs 128 physical cores on one die and the performance of those cores scale linearly because Ampere’s server chip design is optimized for cloud scaling using an intelligent mesh network-on-chip (NOC) and plenty of I/O and memory bandwidth. Each CPU core is designed with a sizeable cache and consistently fast clock speed. The chip’s power efficiency allows it to maintain consistent performance under heavy workloads.

Modern cloud infrastructure needs to be scalable and must extend seamlessly beyond the main data center. Hybrid multi-cloud architectures require resources that are distributed from hyperscale data centers, on-prem private clouds, edge resources, and all points in between. The Ampere “Cloud Native” processing is optimized for such a distributed environment with consistent performance and low power.

Cloud Services (and Others) Running the Ampere Altra (Max)

Arm-based cloud instances are making significant market share gains based largely on Ampere CPU chips. While the interest in Arm-based cloud instances was first felt with the early AWS Graviton instances released in 2018, the real growth has recently been driven by companies using Ampere Altra processors. Oracle Cloud was one of the first to embrace Ampere chips, but more recently, in September, Microsoft released new Ampere-based Azure virtual machines and Google Cloud released a T2A preview instance in August, also based on Ampere CPUs. HPE announced an Ampere-based ProLiant system at HPE Discover in July and European web hosting company Hetzner announced Ampere-based instances in August.

The application for low-power compute based on Ampere server chips extends to autonomous driving – the Cruise autonomous car development platform uses an Altra processor to reduce power consumption while still achieving the required compute performance. Arm-based servers are also perfect for supporting Android cloud gaming. For example, Nvidia and Ampere are working together on a project called AICAN (Android-in-Cloud-with-Ampere-and-NVIDIA). The AICAN server platform uses Ampere Altra Processors and NVIDIA GPUs that run Arm-compatible Android mobile games natively, without modification or emulation. One more example: the ability to lower operating costs and yet provide more cores allows Red Bull Racing to use Oracle Cloud and Ampere Altra for better and faster race simulations.

Summary

Arm-based server market share is growing, especially in cloud instances. While AWS has designed its own Arm-based Graviton processor, many other cloud service providers have leaned on Ampere Altra products to pack more CPU cores per rack and to lower operating costs, without investing in a server CPU design team. Ampere’s server chips give them all the benefits without the risk.

Arm’s new Neoverse roadmap, Alibaba Yitian 710, AWS Graviton 3, Nvidia’s Grace, and Ampere’s AmpereOne are leading to a robust Arm server ecosystem. While the Alibaba and AWS chips are designed strictly for internal use, and the Nvidia Grace chip is targeting HPC and AI workloads, the Ampere Computing chips are focused on bringing predictable high performance and efficiency to the cloud and the network edge.

The Ampere Computing solution should be getting even more attractive with the AmpereOne, which uses a new, custom CPU core, based on the Arm instruction set but wholly designed by the company’s experienced design team and manufactured with an advanced, 5nm process technology. Details of AmpereOne are still forthcoming. Meanwhile, Ampere Computing is only getting started in its plans to lead cloud server development and deployment.

Update: New picture of Renée J. James

_{Tirias Research tracks and consults for companies throughout the electronics ecosystem from semiconductors to systems and sensors to the cloud. Members of the Tirias Research team have consulted for AMD, Ampere, Arm, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Synopsys, and other companies throughout the cloud and IP ecosystems.}