Ampere Computing Steps Up With Monthly Open-Source Firmware Releases

We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware.

Ampere has already proven themselves as the most capable AArch64 server vendor to date and with their new Ampere Altra Max at 128 cores per socket showing they can compete with the latest offerings from AMD and Intel for highly scalable workloads. They are also now making inroads on their open-source firmware strategy.

The company wrote on their blog, "Ampere is committed to supporting open-source firmware on its platforms. Open-source firmware is critical to the datacenter ecosystem and future innovation. Our customers require these solutions to work seamlessly on their platforms...We have established a monthly release cycle, which enables a rich set of features for Ampere Altra on the Mt. Jade platform as well as Ampere’s Altra Max SOC."

With that they also published a whitepaper outlining their open-source firmware support via TianoCore/EDK, LinuxBoot, OpenBMC, and OpenOCD. They cite their open-source code around the firmware for Ampere Altra and Mount Jade that has already been available publicly while now is set to see a monthly release cycle to see more rigorous updates and we'll see what more they may have in store for open-source firmware moving forward. For many years we have been eager to see more open-source firmware on modern hardware platforms and great to see steps by major server vendors shifting in that direction thanks to increasing industry demand around security and transparency.