With the advent of higher performance Arm based cloud computing, a lot of focus is being put on what the various competitors can do in this space. We’ve covered Ampere Computing’s previous eMag products, which actually came from the acquisition of Applied Micro, but the next generation hardware is called Altra, and after a few months of teasing some high performance compute, the company is finally announcing its product list, as well as an upcoming product due for sampling this year.
Ampere’s Altra is a realized version of Arm’s Neoverse N1 enterprise core, much like Amazon’s Graviton2, but this time in an 80-core arrangement. Where Graviton2 is designed to suit Amazon’s needs for Arm-based instances, Ampere’s goal is essentially to supply a better-than-Graviton2 solution to the rest of the big cloud service providers (CSPs). Of the companies that have committed to an N1 based design, so far on paper Ampere is publically the biggest and fastest on the books.
Can we have these in workstations please? I know they’re not designed for my kinds of uses, but damn if these aren’t awesome.
Well, this one is not yet available, but you can try this:
https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/cex7-lx2160/
ARM looks set to take off on the desktop and the server, just like it has everywhere else. I am looking forward to all the new computing devices we will have access to over the next few years.
Who would have thought so much would change these past years.
Mac is moving to ARM.
Not to forget the top position:
https://www.top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-powered-supercomputer/
AMD is taking over positions from Intel.
And RISC-V is getting used for microcontrollers.
Supposedly PowerPC is fully open, in some ways even more than RISC-V even.