Ampere Computing Announces AmpereOne With Up to 192 Cores Per Socket

Ampere Computing announced this morning that their AmpereOne family of processors have entered production and provided additional details on these in-house designed Arm server processors.

The new AmpereOne cores are an in-house custom core design as previously disclosed by the company. In designing AmpereOne squarely for cloud service providers, AmpereOne offers up to 192 physical cores per socket -- well above the already-impressive 128 cores currently afforded by Ampere Altra Max.

I was briefed in advance on Ampere Computing's updated roadmap and while AmpereOne is in production and sampling with customers, I haven't yet had the opportunity to test any AmpereOne platforms first-hand for looking independently at their performance and power efficiency. Hopefully that will happen soon. Some details on AmpereOne are still limited, such as no SKU table with clock speeds, pricing information, or availability by public cloud service providers having been disclosed during the advanced briefing. As anticipated, AmpereOne moves to DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5.0 -- matching the capabilities of the latest AMD EPYC "Genoa" and Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

New with the AmpereOne custom cores is Bfloat16, memory tagging, single-key memory encryption, secure virtualization, enhanced power management, and a range of other improvements over prior Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors.

One of the aspects I was most surprised by with AmpereOne is that they at least for now are limiting it to higher core counts not covered by Ampere Altra / Altra Max. In other words, AmpereOne is for 136 / 144 / 160 / 176 / 192 core counts... There isn't currently any AmpereOne processors planned for 128 cores or less currently covered by the Ampere Altra family. Presumably this is due to their big bet on aiming the new processors squarely for cloud service providers interested in maximizing VM density. I had inquired about the possibility of a lower core count AmpereOne developer processor or for those wanting less cores but interested in AmpereOne for BFloat16 or other new capabilities found with these new processors, but currently they don't have any products planned in this segment. In other words, go big or go home.

At the top end with AmpereOne at 192 core counts is around a 350 Watt usage power reporting. AmpereOne taps out at 8 channels of DDR5 memory like Intel Sapphire Rapids but below the 12 channel DDR5 enjoyed by AMD Genoa.

Ampere's custom core features 64KB 4-way L1 data cache per core, 16KB L1 instruction cache per core, and a 2MB L2 cache per core. There are said to be power efficiency gains, presumably in part due to the upgrade in TSMC manufacturing process but the exact details were not laid out.