AMD Opteron 64-Bit ARM-Based Developer Kits Now Available

[Cristian_25H]

AMD today announced the immediate availability of the AMD Opteron A1100-Series developer kit, which features AMD's first 64-bit ARM-based processor, codenamed "Seattle." AMD is the first company to provide a standard ARM Cortex-A57-based server platform for software developers and integrators. Software and hardware developers as well as early adopters in large datacenters are eligible and can apply on AMD's website.

"The journey toward a more efficient infrastructure for large-scale datacenters is taking a major step forward today with broader availability of our AMD Opteron A1100-Series development kit," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, general manager and vice president, Server business unit, AMD. "After successfully sampling to major ecosystem partners such as firmware, OS, and tools providers, we are taking the next step in what will be a collaborative effort across the industry to reimagine the datacenter based on the open business model of ARM innovation."



With this announcement, AMD becomes the only provider of 64-bit ARM server hardware with complete ARMv8 instruction set support to foster the development of the ecosystem for efficient storage, Web applications and hosting. AMD is the only provider to offer the standard ARM Cortex-A57 technology.

The AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor supports:

• 4 and 8 ARM Cortex-A57 cores
• 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

The AMD Opteron A1100 development kit is packaged in a microATX form factor and includes:

• An AMD Opteron A1100-Series processor with 4 cores
• 2 Registered DIMM with 16 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
• Standard UEFI boot environment
• Linux environment based on Fedora technology from the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora community
• 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 enable developers to work in a 64-bit ARM environment

Complete developer kits are available for $2,999 USD.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Nice to see amd hitting some different strokes now they are 45 , ooh ddr4 support too nice.

 

[cyneater]

Id like one of these ins a desktop...
ohh 8 sata ports

 

[Aquinus]

Can't wait to see where this goes. I can see a lot of good coming out of this and might be a preview of things to come, not just in the server world but maybe in the consumer market as well.

 

[sweet]

8 lanes of PCIe gen 3, in this day :|

 

[NC37]

8 lanes of PCIe gen 3, in this day :|

Well it is a server CPU.

 

[Aquinus]

Well it is a server CPU.

There is an argument that certain kinds of servers need more depending on what you're doing with it. I would go with 8 just to see where it goes. Just because this is what the dev kit has doesn't mean it will be final product. Apple had the Intel transition workstations that were basically PCs made to legitimately run OS X for the sake of porting applications even though the hardware in these workstations weren't the same as what was actually used in production.

 

[Disparia]

Twelve PCIe lanes seems to make more sense with it positioned for both standalone and dense systems, however, they may be anticipating that most of the chips will be going into the former. In that case I think we'll all be happy that the die space is spent on 10Gb Ethernet instead of four additional lanes. Whether you're using it directly or hoping for 10Gbe trickle-down, there's a benefit to having it in every chip.

Of course, as mentioned earlier it could be true that this version is for development and to solicit feedback from users.

Dense "Group Hug" backplanes which are vendor neutral and provide PCIe x8 connections per SoC board: