AMD has taken a major step towards delivering choice and innovation in the data centre with the launch of the AMD Opteron A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), formerly codenamed “Seattle”.
Together 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 data centre.
“Today is a key inflexion point for AMD,” says Daniel Bounds, senior director for data center products at AMD. “It is an important step for us. In our DNA is the concept of providing choice which ultimately leads to new innovations. It’s not ideal to have a single source of silicon in all systems.”
It also goes a long way to delivering on the promise of the ARM platform, and this is the first of many such announcements, he adds.
“We are very excited about getting to market with this. It is a significant investment and initiative for us.”
Scott Aylor, corporate vice-president and GM: enterprise solutions at AMD, comments: “The addition of AMD’s high-performance processor is another strong step forward for customers looking for a data centre-class ARM solution. 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 data centre. “The AMD Opteron A1100 processor brings a new choice in scalability across network infrastructure and data centres,” says Lakshmi Mandyam, director of server systems and ecosystems: ARM at AMD. “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.
The SoC includes up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 4Mb shared Level 2 and 8Mb of shared Level 3 cache; two 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 channels supporting up to 1866 MHz with ECC; two 10Gb Ethernet network connectivity; eight-lane PCI-Express Gen 3; and 14 SATA-3 ports.
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 immediately. AMD is working with both hardware and software partners to ensure that solutions are available on the platform.
