AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM-Based Opteron A1100 System On Chip With Integrated 10GbE (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD is adding a new family of Opterons to its enterprise processor line-up today called the Opteron A1100 series. Unlike AMD's previous enterprise offerings, however, these new additions are packing ARM-based processor cores, not the X86 cores AMD has been producing for years. The Opteron A1100 series is designed for a variety of use cases and applications, including networking, storage, dense and power-efficient web serving, and 64-bit ARM software development. The new family was formerly codenamed "Seattle" and it represents the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. AMD Opteron A1100 Series chips will pack up to eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores with up to 4MB of shared Level 2 and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache. They offer two 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 memory channels supporting speeds up to 1866 MHz with ECC and capacities up to 128GB, dual integrated 10Gb Ethernet network connections, 8-lanes of PCI-Express Gen 3 connectivity, and 14 SATA III ports. AMD is shipping to a number of software and hardware partners now with development systems already available.

Comments

Only X8 pci-e?

[Joe_Dragon]

Only X8 pci-e?

At least they have dual 10-gige but come on give at least x16 pci-e even if you need to cut down the sata links.

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[CastrTroy]

For what purpose? These are obviously meant for the server room. What need do you have for anything beyond pci-e X8 if you don't even have a video card?

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a hunch this will be more aimed at "lots and lots of dies in one small box" applications rather than as part of a large monolithic system. (Think virt host)

You only need enough I/O to attach a few disks or a controller to attach to a SAN or something like infiniband and x8 is plenty. You could attach a single GPGPU as well but I don't think that would be a target application. (Does Nvidia even have Tesla support for ARM platforms?)

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[chuckymonkey]

Some servers do have video cards. We have them in lots of our servers for GPU compute tasks.

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[mrchaotica]

So would your GPU compute servers benefit from having an ARM instead of x86 CPU?

Clearly, there is some market where the workload favors ARM CPUs, and some market where the workload favors GPU computing (and therefore PCIe x16). Combining both in the same product only makes sense if there's some market that needs both at the same time. It's not as if AMD were discontinuing x86 Opterons, after all.

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[mrchaotica]

NV-Link just sounds like an Nvidia copy of Hypertransport.

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[wbr1]

GPUs for compute tasks do not need the bandwidth that GPUs pushing videos do. Look at and old mining rig using GPUs, you get 16x to 1x cables and stack your compute GPUs.

Re:Only X8 pci-e?

[wbr1]

Still for rendering tasks, a large part of the bus is needed for moving large textures in and out of memory. While I am not an expert in this field, I do not think may of the other current GPU compute tasks require this memory bandwidth, so as large a bus is not needed.

10GbE isn't that interesting

[slaker]

10GbE Ethernet, (at least over copper, which is the only way I've gotten to mess with it), kinda sucks. Cost per port is really high and actually so are the power requirements per port. Infiniband was a lot easier and cheaper for me to deal with and having it implemented in relatively common hardware might improve its adoption.

Re:10GbE isn't that interesting

[PeeAitchPee]

That's cuz you're not doing it right. Having dual 10GbE ports on each end will let you run SMB3 Multichannel for network transfer speeds that will outpace anything but the fastest RAID arrays. We're seeing real-world file transfer speeds of over 1.3 gigabytes (not gigabits) / second over copper Ethernet. I'm seldom a Microsoft advocate but it is awesome.

Re:10GbE isn't that interesting

[hattig]

The A1170 high end Opteron has a 32W TDP, and two built-in 10GigE ports, for under $150 (expected SoC price).

So how is that expensive per port, in terms of power consumption, etc?

Re:10GbE isn't that interesting

[Junta]

Cost per port on the switch side and power requirements on the switch side I presume he means. Particularly if he's talking about CAT6 rather than DAC, it is a pretty huge power hog. Note that in relatively recent developments a wave of PHYs have come about that significantly improve that, but it's still pretty big.

Now using DACs should bring the power complaint in line with infiniband, though the runs can't be very long by comparison, but then again 'cheap' Infiniband cables can't be that long either (which are just common with 40 GbE assuming we are talking about QDR, FDR, or EDR IB).

Re:10GbE isn't that interesting

[jon3k]

There's lots of ways to aggregate multiple NICs (ie LACP). It's very easy to bond multiple 10Gb ports to increase bandwidth. And I've gotten comfortably over 1GB/s over a single 10Gb NIC.

Re:10GbE isn't that interesting

[PeeAitchPee]

SMB3 Multichannel isn't the same as link aggregation. It assigns CPU cores to process SMB transfers as they come across the wire(s), thereby handling one of the real-world bottlenecks (i.e., that the client typically chokes trying to process all of that inbound data coming off of the fast pipe).

Word On The Street

[zenlessyank]

is that this chip is going be about US $150.

Decent specs.. but

[wbr1]

Hopefully the sales of this will be good enough for them to push the Zen core chips this year. If they come out as expected, they could be a great chip. I have several Bulldozer based machines, and when built they were a good balance of performance for price, but no more. They are really starting to show their age. They have always been spanked by i5 and above Intels, and as new intels continue to come out, prices on one or 2 generation back intels get better and the price difference ceases to be an issue.

So, please AMD, I want to be a fan, give us a good CPU again!

Re: For the love of...

[Billly Gates]

Still there is a common misconception that all servers are CPU bound.

Not true for databases or Java servlet apps. It is latency based. Latency on networks and disk i/o as your SQL query gets processed and the CPU goes on massive WAIT cycles in the process.

An ARM will be great for lower power with an SSD and lots of bandwidth.

Re:AMD still around?

[KiloByte]

AMD is vital. All recent and semi-recent Intel CPUs include AMT which is a backdoor that can control any aspect of the running system without being detectable in any way by the operating system. It includes a completely separate sub-processor that has full control of the machine while being invisible to the main CPU.