hist78
Well-known member
Although HPE hasn't revealed the pricing yet, this is an interesting development to address ever growing cloud based applications and power consumption in the data center.
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Ampere Computing has three major outside investors, Oracle, The Carlyle Group, and Arm Holding. Oracle alone has invested $426 million in Ampere. Large system and software companies not only can afford to design their own chips but also can invest in startups that otherwise may not afford to start a chip project.Oracle is also using Ampere in their cloud datacenters, which is a big win. I think Ampere has the right idea for cloud servers. Lots of cores, lots of memory channels, and no multithreading. For some reason, however, perhaps because they're not impressed with Arm's Neoverse core roadmap, or perhaps thinking that they need more differentiation lest a competitor copies their strategy, Ampere is developing their own cores, a la Apple. It should be interesting to see that how that turns out. I would have thought focusing on cloud-computing offloads would be a better use of power and die space, but Atiq Bajwa is a smart guy.
Yes, I know about Oracle's investment. There's a big difference though between an investment and choosing CPUs for the highly competitive enterprise cloud market. It's not just a matter of the hardware investment, Oracle almost certainly invested a bunch in optimization of their own software (databases, middleware, applications, drivers & network stacks for their InfiniBand fabrics, etc, to name some software that comes to mind) to make best use of the Neoverse cores and the Ampere architecture. I'm impressed Ampere got the win.Ampere Computing has three major outside investors, Oracle, The Carlyle Group, and Arm Holding. Oracle alone has invested $426 million in Ampere. Large system and software companies not only can afford to design their own chips but also can invest in startups that otherwise may not afford to start a chip project.