AmpereOne Processors: Features & Benefits
Giga Computing, which is a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and a pioneer in the market of high-performance servers, server motherboards, and workstations, has just made an announcement regarding the availability of four new GIGABYTE R-series servers that are compatible with the AmpereOne Family of CPUs. These servers are designed for use in cloud-native computing environments, which place a premium on both high compute density per rack and power efficiency. These settings are ideal for using servers with these characteristics.
When it comes to cloud-native computing, hyperscalers or cloud service providers (CSPs) rely on predictable high-performance infrastructure that is scalable, as well as nodes that are efficient in terms of the amount of power they consume. The GIGABYTE servers that are powered by the AmpereOne Family platform are able to live up to these expectations; nevertheless, this is not the first time that GIGABYTE has worked with Ampere Computing. The collaboration did not begin in earnest until the year 2020, which was also the year when the Ampere Altra platform was unveiled to the general public for the very first time.
Ampere Computing has created a whole new family of CPUs that they refer to as AmpereOne. This new family will not take the place of the Altra platform; rather, it represents an augmentation of what the Arm architecture is capable of achieving and will be used alongside the Altra platform.
For instance, the number of cores in the central processing unit (CPU) goes from 128 in Altra to 136-192 in AmpereOne, which enables previously unimaginable levels of speed as well as virtual machine (VM) density. In addition to this, the private L2 cache that is allotted to each core has been expanded by a factor of two, and there is support for both DDR5 memory and PCI Express Generation 5 (Gen 5) expansion cards.
The AmpereOne platform and GIGABYTE servers are a natural fit for one another, and GIGABYTE provides choices for both single socket and twin socket configurations in the 1U and 2U form factors of their servers. Despite this, the size of the larger 2U servers (R283-P93 & R263-P33) makes it possible to host a large number of dual-slot GPUs.
These servers also include additional expansion slots that may be used for networking, AI inference cards, and other off-chip devices. The 1U servers (R183-P92 & R163-P32) are able to accommodate solid-state drives (SSDs) that operate according to the NVMe, SATA, or SAS protocols. These servers pack a lot of CPUs into a relatively small space.
These new GIGABYTE servers are compatible with the following distributions of Linux and other operating systems: RHEL 9.0, Fedora 36, Oracle 9.0, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 11.
