Tuesday, January 28th 2014
AMD Announces ARM-Based Server CPU and Development Platform
AMD today added a major new milestone to its list of seminal developments in server technology. The company displayed a comprehensive development platform for its first 64-bit ARM-based server CPU, fabricated using 28 nanometer process technology, the first from an established server vendor. AMD also announced the imminent sampling of the ARM-based processor, named the AMD Opteron A1100 Series, and a development platform, which includes an evaluation board and a comprehensive software suite. In addition, AMD announced that it would be contributing to the Open Compute Project a new micro-server design using the AMD Opteron A-Series, as part of the common slot architecture specification for motherboards dubbed "Group Hug."
The AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed "Seattle," will sample this quarter along with a development platform that will make software design on the industry's premier ARM-based server CPU quick and easy. AMD is collaborating with industry leaders to enable a robust 64-bit software ecosystem for ARM-based designs from compilers and simulators to hypervisors, operating systems and application software, in order to address key workloads in Web-tier and storage data center environments. The AMD Opteron A-Series development platform will be supported by a broad set of tools and software including a standard UEFI boot and Linux environment based on the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution.
"The needs of the data center are changing. A one-size-fits-all approach typically limits efficiency and results in higher-cost solutions," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the AMD server business unit. "The new ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor brings the experience and technology portfolio of an established server processor vendor to the ARM ecosystem and provides the ideal complement to our established AMD Opteron x86 server processors."
The AMD Opteron A1100 Series processors support:
AMD continues to drive the evolution of the open-source data center from vision to reality and bring choice among processor architectures. It is contributing the new AMD Open CS 1.0 Common Slot design based on the AMD Opteron A-Series processor compliant with the new Common Slot specification, also announced today, to the Open Compute Project.
"Predefined, 'one size fits all' server platforms are giving way to customized solutions that deliver high performance at the lowest power consumption," said Frank Frankovsky, chairman and president of the Open Compute Project. "AMD's contribution to the Open Compute Project expands a growing portfolio of OCP designs that enable utilization and efficiency gains in data center operations."
For more information please visit AMD's booth at the Open Compute Summit today and tomorrow where the AMD Opteron-A development kit, AMD Open CS 1.0 server platform and partner technologies will be on display.
The AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed "Seattle," will sample this quarter along with a development platform that will make software design on the industry's premier ARM-based server CPU quick and easy. AMD is collaborating with industry leaders to enable a robust 64-bit software ecosystem for ARM-based designs from compilers and simulators to hypervisors, operating systems and application software, in order to address key workloads in Web-tier and storage data center environments. The AMD Opteron A-Series development platform will be supported by a broad set of tools and software including a standard UEFI boot and Linux environment based on the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution.
"The needs of the data center are changing. A one-size-fits-all approach typically limits efficiency and results in higher-cost solutions," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the AMD server business unit. "The new ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor brings the experience and technology portfolio of an established server processor vendor to the ARM ecosystem and provides the ideal complement to our established AMD Opteron x86 server processors."
The AMD Opteron A1100 Series processors support:
- 4 or 8 core ARM Cortex-A57 processors
- Up to 4 MB of shared L2 and 8 MB of shared L3 cache
- Configurable dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory channels with ECC at up to 1866 MT/second
- Up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMMs
- 8 lanes of PCI-Express Gen 3 I/O
- 8 Serial ATA 3 ports
- 2 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports
- ARM TrustZone technology for enhanced security
- Crypto and data compression co-processors
- An AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor
- 4 Registered DIMM slots for up to 128 GB of DDR3 DRAM
- PCI Express connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports
- 8 Serial-ATA connectors
- Compatibility with standard power supplies
- Ability to be used stand-alone or mounted in standard rack-mount chassis
- Standard UEFI boot environment
- Linux environment based on Fedora, which provides developers with a rich set of tools and applications
Standard Linux GNU tool chain, including cross-development version
Platform device drivers
Apache web server, MySQL database engine, and PHP scripting language for developing robust web serving applications
Java 7 and Java 8 versions to provide developers to work in a 64-bit ARM environment
AMD continues to drive the evolution of the open-source data center from vision to reality and bring choice among processor architectures. It is contributing the new AMD Open CS 1.0 Common Slot design based on the AMD Opteron A-Series processor compliant with the new Common Slot specification, also announced today, to the Open Compute Project.
"Predefined, 'one size fits all' server platforms are giving way to customized solutions that deliver high performance at the lowest power consumption," said Frank Frankovsky, chairman and president of the Open Compute Project. "AMD's contribution to the Open Compute Project expands a growing portfolio of OCP designs that enable utilization and efficiency gains in data center operations."
For more information please visit AMD's booth at the Open Compute Summit today and tomorrow where the AMD Opteron-A development kit, AMD Open CS 1.0 server platform and partner technologies will be on display.
23 Comments on AMD Announces ARM-Based Server CPU and Development Platform
Most server workloads can be parallelized just fine, so if I can cram multiple of these CPUs in the same space that I can put 1 Xeon in, for less money, and they use less power, then win. Otherwise fail :)
With all three console wins, the Kaveri desktop APU and soon to be laptop APU releases and now a custom ARM based server option, AMD is moving forward from their reorganization. They have a tall mountain to climb and they've just started the journey. If they can keep the profits coming they will be able to increase their resources and capitalize on a lot of other products.
I personally think if AMD is going to focus on ARM they really need to get Phone and Tablet APU's to the market. If they could get a decent energy efficient CPU paired with a mobile GCN-esque GPU they could clean up in the mobile market--which is pretty damn profitable these days.
The correct way to do it (and is done already) is to add functionality to the app (on phone), to talk over internet to your server, and your server runs a specialized server program that can handle the queries (from multiple clients, and reply quickly)
edit: those servers are a completely new platform and need a tone of modifications and patches to make android work. as I said before you can achieve nearly 90% of the performance of a system that runs on the metal with the right virtualization s/w and the acceleration from those amd-v and v-pro features
Running Java on servers is an acceptable choice for many enterprises, because scaling is much easier than with a traditional LAMP stack.
Base memory overhead of Java is kinda bad (but scales well for many connections), and RAM is kinda free nowadays.
Our TPU mobile apps use just a normal REST API to fetch their data. Easy to integrate with the existing web server structure, and easily accessible from any other platform, in case we decide to have apps for other mobile systems.
On the second point, I agree with this a lot. A great example is every time you run a PHP script from a LAMP stack, the entire state of the application needs to be configured, where on a Java server, it very well could be sitting, waiting, and ready to roll. It's also important to make the distinction between Java itself and the JVM. There some languages like Clojure that leverage the JVM and Java classes. It's actually pretty cool having the JVM under you when you're writing functional code. The only downfall (as W1zz said already) is the initial memory footprint and the time it takes to spin up the JVM, which makes it suitable for long running applications but not CLI tools.
Java does make coding tools to code once for all the platforms, at the expense of performance, which is highly evident in their implementations performance.
Pit a 16x PCI-E port and it would make a great HT-PC.
One potential issue could be single thread performance which affects page generation time, nothing can even come close to x86 here.