Ampere Computing
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops ARM-based computer processors for servers. Ampere also has offices in Portland, Oregon, Taipei, Taiwan, Raleigh, North Carolina, Bangalore, India and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

History 
In October 2017, Ampere Computing was founded by Renée James after The Carlyle Group acquired AppliedMicro's X-Gene IP, assets and architectural license from MACOM.

In April 2018, Ampere joined the Green Computing Consortium (GCC) as a Platinum Member, and Renée James was named as the vice chair of the GCC. In September 2018, Ampere announced a partnership with Lenovo, with Lenovo releasing 1U and 2U platforms with Ampere eMAG.

In March 2019, Packet announced their c2.large.arm configuration featuring Ampere's eMAG 8180. In April 2019, Ampere announced their second major investment round, including investment from Arm Holdings and Oracle Corporation. In June 2019, Nvidia announced a partnership with Ampere to bring support for CUDA. In November 2019, Nvidia announced reference design platform for GPU-accelerated Arm-based servers including Ampere eMAG.

In the first half of 2020, Ampere announced Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max, a cloud native processor.  

In September 2020, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and VM instances early next year based on Ampere Altra.  

In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups.

Products 
Ampere develops ARM-based computer processors under their eMAG and Altra brands.

On February 5, 2018, Ampere announced the eMAG 8180 featuring 32x Skylark cores fabricated on TSMC’s 16FF+ process. It supports a turbo of up to 3.3 GHz with a TDP of 125 W, 8ch 64-bit DDR4, up to 1TB DDR4 per socket, and 42x PCIe 3.0 Lanes. The Skylark cores were based on AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3. Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking. On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores.

On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80x Quicksilver cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process. The Quicksilver cores are semi-custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications. It supports a frequency of up to 3.3 GHz with TDP of 250 W, 8ch 72-bit DDR4, up to 4TB DDR4 per socket, 128x PCIe 4.0 Lanes, 1MB L2 per core and 32MB SLC.

Ampere also announced their roadmap with Altra Max (2021) in development and Siryn (2022) defined. Altra Max will use the same socket as Altra.

See also 

 ARM architecture
AppliedMicro & X-Gene

References

External links 

 

Companies based in Santa Clara, California
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Semiconductor companies of the United States
Fabless semiconductor companies
Technology companies established in 2017
American companies established in 2019