Ampere Announces Altra ARM CPUs with Up to 80 Cores, Going to 128 Cores by 2021
takyon writes:
Ampere's Product List: 80 Cores, up to 3.3 GHz at 250 W; 128 Core in Q4
The Ampere Altra range, as part of today's release, will offer parts from 32 cores up to 80 cores, up to 3.3 GHz, with a variety of TDPs up to 250 W. As we've described in our previous news items on the chip, this is an Arm v8.2 core with a few 8.3+8.5 features, offers support for FP16 and INT8, supports 8 channels of DDR4-3200 ECC at 2 DIMMs per channel, and up to 4 TiB of memory per socket in a 1P or 2P configuration. Each CPU will offer 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, 32 of which can be used for socket-to-socket communications implemented with the CCIX protocol over PCIe. This means 50 GB/s in each direction, and 192 PCIe 4.0 lanes in a dual socket system for add-in cards. Each of the PCIe lanes can bifurcate down to x2.
[...] Previously Ampere had stated they were going for 80 cores at 3.0 GHz at 210 W, however the Q80-33 is pushing that frequency another 300 MHz for another 40 W, and we understand that the tapeout of silicon from TSMC performed better than expected, hence this new top processor.
[...] If that wasn't enough, Ampere dropped a sizeable nugget into our pre-announcement briefing. The company is set to launch a 128-core version of Altra later this year.
This will be a new silicon design, beyond Ampere's initial layout of 80 cores for Altra, however Ampere states that while they are using the same platform as the regular Altra, they have done extensive tweaking and optimizations within the mesh interconnect for Altra Max to hide the additional contention that might occur when using the same main memory speeds.
Altra Max will be socket and pin-compatible with Altra, also support dual socket deployments, and Ampere states that the silicon will be ready for early sampling with partners in Q4, and is looking to move into high volume in mid-2021.
Previously: Ampere Launches its First ARM-Based Server Processors in Challenge to Intel
80-Core Arm CPU To Bring Lower Power, Higher Density To A Rack Near You
Related: Amazon Announces 64-core Graviton2 Arm CPU
Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads
AMD and Intel Have a Formidable New Foe (Amazon)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.