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Former Intel President Launches New Chip Company With Backing From Carlyle Group

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 07 2018, @06:13PM   
from the do-they-have-barbeque-flavor? dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

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

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.

Source: TechCrunch

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Original Submission

• ARM's Humble Beginnings ARM's Humble Beginnings (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 08 2018, @01:23AM (3 children)

  by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday February 08 2018, @01:23AM (#634596) Homepage Journal

  The brits just wanted an inexpensive computer for schoolchildren without having to buy Z80s from the yanks.

  --
  Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
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• Now? A complex array of binary blobs. Now? A complex array of binary blobs. (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @03:05AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @03:05AM (#634652)

  ARM is a disaster.

  It's an enormous blemish in the Linux repository, and it's basically useless without a pile of shite from "vendors", especially with regard to GPUs.

  Thanks, Brits!

  Parent

  • Re:Now? A complex array of binary blobs. (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 08 2018, @01:59PM

    by requerdanos (5997) on Thursday February 08 2018, @01:59PM (#634917) Journal

    useless without a pile of [binary blobs] from "vendors", especially with regard to GPUs.

    While this is true especially in the case of the raspberry pi series, which require a GPU blob even to boot, not all the ARM chips are created equal.

    There are ARM chips (and onboard ARM GPUs) that don't require binary blobs to function.

    ARM as an architecture is more of a guideline than a rigid single specification. As a manufacturer, you tick the boxes you want, maybe make some stuff up, and roll your own design when making an "ARM" chip. Wikipedia calls it, rather poetically, a "family of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments" which says it nicely.

    Parent

• Re:ARM's Humble Beginnings (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday February 08 2018, @10:05AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Thursday February 08 2018, @10:05AM (#634801) Journal

  Uh, no. The BBC Micro (and Acorn's other early computers) used a 6502, not a Z80. When Acorn looked for a 16-bit replacement, they didn't like many of the options. They looked at the Berkeley RISC project and saw that a team of half a dozen people using modern VLSI techniques could produce a chip that was performance competitive with ones sourced from larger companies and decided to try it. Their chip ended up being very power efficient as a result of its simplicity and so Apple became interested in using it for the Newton, but didn't want to buy chips from a direct competitor, so Apple, Acorn and VLSI Technology spun out ARM as a separate company that would sell to both Apple and Acorn (and, quite soon, lots of other companies), initially with VLSI Technology doing all of the fabrication. The chips were made in the US from the start, though they were designed in the UK. The fabrication gradually moved to Asia, but most of the design remains in the UK (though there's also a big team in Austin that does quite a lot).

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  sudo mod me up

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