ARM is a well-known name in smartphones and tablet world due to the fact that plenty of processors for both type of devices are built using ARM architecture. As the architecture enables these processors to have lower power consumption, several companies have showed interests on the architecture with the intention of adopting it for servers and data centre usage.
One of them is AMD who has officially announced its 64-bit ARM-based processors for servers called the Opteron A1100. Previously codenamed as “Seattle”, the 28-nm AMD Opteron A1100 processor comes with either four or eight Cortex-A57 cores that run at a speed of at least 2GHz and supports up to 128 GB of RAM.
Here is list of other features that AMD has packed into the ARM-based Opteron A1100 processor:
– Up to 4 MB of shared L2 and 8 MB of shared L3 cache
– Configurable dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory channels with ECC at up to 1866 MT/second
– Up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMMs
– 8 lanes of PCI-Express Gen 3 I/O
– 8 x Serial ATA 3 ports
– 2 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports
– ARM TrustZone technology for enhanced security
– Crypto and data compression co-processors
At the same time, AMD has also announced a development kit in a MicroATX form factor that consisted of the new AMD Opteron A1100 processor itself together with a reference board and Fedora-based Linux environment as well as a set of tools and applications. The processor will begin sampling this March while servers and OEM announcements are expected to happen in Q4 2014.
Although AMD will not be ditching its x86 processors any time soon, the company is pretty confident of the bright future that ARM-based server processors might have. Plus, it is also confident that it will be a leader in the segment. Well, being one of the early adopters might able to help the company to achieve that.
