Former Intel President about to give new competition to Data Centers?

[BluJay614]

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/05/former-intel-president-launches-new-chip-company-with-backing-from-carlyle-group/

Okay, so a new week, a week away from the launch of Raven Ridge, and....."new" cips???

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Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers.

Okay, so it is a new company, it is run by a former Intel president, and it is aimed at specific data centers..... However, not exactly "new" as it is based off of ARM cpus.

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The company’s first chip is a custom core Armv8-A 64-bit server operating at up to 3.3 GHz with 1TB of memory at a power envelope of 125 watts. Although James was not ready to share pricing, she promised that the chip would offer unsurpassed price/performance that would exceed any high performance computing chip out there.

The company has a couple of other products in the works as well, which it will unveil in the future

Okay, so it's a custom version of a pre=existing ARM server cpu, running at a fairly decent clock speed(no mention of core count), and a respectable amount of memory and TDP. Really now, nothing else seems to be known about it, except they are looking to compete with Xeon and Epyc, and they have more coming.

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It takes a ton of money and some guts to launch a chip company, but James, who worked at Intel for 28 years, had the pedigree to pull in a highly experienced team of industry heavyweights to build the product. The company is being backed by The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm where James worked briefly after leaving Intel. She would not disclose the amount of funding, but did say her company was significantly well capitalized.

Okay, so no lightweight herself, and allegedly a good team, and serious backer.

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As for what motivated her to start a new company, she saw an opportunity to do something that had not had been done and she decided to pursue the challenge. “You’re only done until the next great thing is done, then you’re not done anymore,” she said.

The opportunity James saw was workloads moving to the cloud that required a new generation of chip technology that was more efficient than those that had been created in the past. Specifically, she wanted to build a high-density chip from the ground up that was extremely power/performance efficient at a lower cost.

The company, which is based in Santa Clara, launched in early 2017 and has between 300-400 people. As she pointed out, “this isn’t a garage startup.” The chips are in sampling right now with customers and partners and will go into production later this year. She but declined to name any customers just yet, but partners include Microsoft, Lenovo and Oracle.

Okay, so she believes that there is always a pursuit for the "next great thing", and in a sense it's true..... if only innovation came a little easier. Also going for great efficiency/performance @ a low cost, always a good goal to hit all three pillars. Based in Cali, and already has more employees then some other, better established, companies that have been around longer (looking at you right now, AKG). Okay, so it's scheduled for released later this year, but we have a few big players in the field.

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Her company was designing this chip and getting ready to unveil it to the world when the Spectre and Meltdown bug news hit last month. As James acknowledged, no modern chip that uses speculative execution can escape these bugs, but she said the Arm exposure was minimal and the chips will have the patches built into them when they hit the market later this year

Okay, so at least she's admitting that it will be effected by Spectre and Meltdown (AMD), though she is trying to brush it off (INTEL) by claiming that ARM hasn't been hit as hard and they will have patches built in.

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She admits that taking on the chip giants requires some guts, but she does not shy away from the challenge. “When you are doing something new, that’s a breakthrough, people say, ‘how are you going to do this’?” She added, “My entire career I’ve been doing things I was told I couldn’t do.”

Well, there's for pushing the boundaries. Now we will see what, if anything, comes of it.

 

Other articles:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60727/ampere-run-ex-intel-execs-announces-new-arm-processor/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/technology/renee-james-intel-ampere-startup.html

http://fortune.com/2018/02/05/intel-president-renee-james-ampere-computing/

[DildorTheDecent]

Stop saying "Okay" all the time.

[mynameisjuan]

So is that 125w for just the chip or 125w for everything (mem, mobo, etc...)? That would determine my opinion on this. 

[Ryujin2003]

12 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

Stop saying "Okay" all the time.

Okay, so.... is just "So..." okay?

[linustouchtips]

13 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

Stop saying "Okay" all the time.

what about k?

[sazrocks]

Not really sure why they expect an arm CPU to go head-to-head with x86 CPUs.

[NumLock21]

mkay

[BluJay614]

9 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

mkay

yes, Mr Garrison

[Trixanity]

If ARM is so competitive I wonder why AMD would drop K12?

 

Seems like they'd need to have very deep pockets and the right connections to get anywhere with this. Which given the circumstances they probably have. But I can't imagine it becoming a major player.

[BluJay614]

Just now, Trixanity said:

If ARM is so competitive I wonder why AMD would drop K12?

 

Seems like they'd need to have very deep pockets and the right connections to get anywhere with this. Which given the circumstances they probably have. But I can't imagine it becoming a major player.

They are presently the underdogs, but we can't rule them out before we know exactly what it is we are dealing with. If they can produce what they are claiming, and it turns out what it's cracked up to be, what's gonna happen to the market?

[Taf the Ghost]

55 minutes ago, BluJay614 said:

They are presently the underdogs, but we can't rule them out before we know exactly what it is we are dealing with. If they can produce what they are claiming, and it turns out what it's cracked up to be, what's gonna happen to the market?

It's going to depend on what Fab they're using, and tuning for that specific process.

[BluJay614]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It's going to depend on what Fab they're using, and tuning for that specific process.

Again, we don't know. There are too many unknown variables that could make or break this thing.