Ampere Computing
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | 2017; 8 years ago (2017) |
| Founder | Renée James |
| Headquarters | , U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
|
| Owner | SoftBank Group |
Number of employees | 1,500 (2024) |
| Website | amperecomputing |
| Footnotes / references [1] [2] | |
Ampere Computing LLC is an American semiconductor company that designs ARM-based central processing units (CPUs) with high core counts for use in cloud computing and data center environments. Founded in 2017 by former Intel president Renée James, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and operates as an independent subsidiary of SoftBank Group since November 2025.
History
[edit ]Ampere Computing was founded in the Fall of 2017 by Renée James,[3] ex-President of Intel, with funding from The Carlyle Group. James acquired a team from MACOM Technology Solutions (formerly AppliedMicro) in addition to several industry hires to start the company.[4] [5] [6] [7] Ampere Computing is an ARM architecture licensee and develops its own server microprocessors.[8] Ampere fabricates its products at TSMC.[9]
In April 2019, Ampere announced its second major investment round, including investment from Arm Holdings and Oracle Corporation.[7] [10] In June 2019, Nvidia announced a partnership with Ampere to bring support for Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).[11] [12] In November 2019, Nvidia announced a reference design platform for graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated ARM-based servers including Ampere.[13]
In the first half of 2020, Ampere announced Ampere Altra an 80-core and Ampere Altra Max a 128-core processor without the use of simultaneous multithreading.[14]
In March 2020, the company announced a partnership with Oracle.[15] In September of that year, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and virtual machine instances in early 2021 based on Ampere Altra.[16]
In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups by CRN .[17]
In May 2021, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft.[18] In July of that year, Ampere acquired OnSpecta, an AI technology startup.[19] After the acquisition, the companies were able to demonstrate four times faster acceleration on Ampere-based instances running AI-inference workloads.[citation needed ]
In April 2022, Ampere said that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling its intent to go public.[20]
In June 2022, HPE announced their Gen11 ProLiant system would use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors.[21]
In July 2022, Google announced T2A instances using Ampere Altra in the Google cloud and in August 2022 Microsoft announced their instances of Ampere running in Azure.[22]
On March 19, 2025, investment holding company SoftBank Group announced it will acquire Ampere Computing for 6ドル.5 billion. The deal finalized in November 2025, with Ampere remaining as an independent subsidiary with its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.[23] [24]
Products
[edit ]Ampere develops ARM-based computer processors and CPU cores under their Altra brands.[14] These are used in databases, media encoding, web services, network acceleration, mobile gaming, AI inference processing, and other applications and programs that need to scale.[25]
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 1 TB DDR4 per socket, and 42x PCIe 3.0 Lanes.[26] The Skylark cores were based on AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3.[26] [27] Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking.[28] On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores.[29]
2020
[edit ]On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80 cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process for hyperscale computing.[30] [31] [32] It was the first server-grade processor to include 80 cores and the Q80-30 conserves power by running at 161 W in use.[30] The cores are semi-custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications.[33] It supports a frequency of up to 3.3 GHz with TDP of 250 W, 8ch 72-bit DDR4, up to 4 TB DDR4-3200 per socket, 128x PCIe 4.0 Lanes, 1 MB L2 per core and 32 MB SLC.[31] [32]
Ampere also announced their roadmap with Ampere Altra Max (2021) in development and AmpereOne (2022) defined.[34]
2021
[edit ]The 128-core Altra Max was released in 2021 and targeted hyperscale cloud providers.[35] It uses the same server socket and platforms as Ampere Altra, and both products have one thread per core.[36] The Altra Max CPUs provide 128 Arm v8.2+ cores per chip and run up to 3.0 GHz. They also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4.[37]
Also in 2021, Oracle launched its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere Altra processors.[38]
2022
[edit ]In February 2022, Ampere and Rigetti Computing announced a strategic partnership to create hybrid quantum-classical computers.[39] The companies will combine Ampere's Altra Max CPUs with Rigetti's Quantum Processing Units (QPU) in cloud-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.[39]
In April, Microsoft previewed its Azure Virtual Machines running on the Ampere Altra.[25] The VMs run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open source databases, cloud native .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and other processes.[25]
In May, Ampere announced the sampling of AmpereOne CPUs, 5 nanometer chips based on its in-house Ampere-developed core.[40] AmpereOne will add support for DDR5 main memory and PCIe Gen5 peripherals.[40]
On June 28, 2022, HPE became first tier-one server provider to offer compute with optimized cloud-native silicon for service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with new line of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers, using Ampere® Altra® and Ampere® Altra® Max processors, delivering high performance and power efficiency.[citation needed ]
2023
[edit ]During April 2023, Ampere released the Altra developer's kit, an IoT Prototype Kit based on Ampere Altra, aimed at cloud developers, available in 32-core, 64-core, and 80-core formats.[41]
2024
[edit ]In May 2024, Ampere updated its AmpereOne roadmap to 256 cores [42] and announced a joint effort with Qualcomm on CPUs and accelerators.[43]
Customers
[edit ]Ampere's customers include Microsoft Azure,[44] Tencent Cloud, Oracle,[45] ByteDance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),[21] Cloudflare, Equinix, Kingsoft Cloud, Meituan, Scaleway, UCloud, Foxconn Industrial Internet, Gigabyte, Inspur, Cruise,[46] Hetzner, Project Ronin,[47] Wiwynn and Google Cloud Platform [48]
Cruise uses an Ampere Altra variant for its autonomous driving unit. The CPU was selected because of its throughput and low power consumption.[46]
In 2021, Oracle, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance committed to using Ampere's customized chips, first announced in May.[49] In April 2022, Microsoft previewed Ampere Altra processors in its new Azure D-and E- series virtual machines.[50] The Dpsv5 series is built for Linux enterprise application types, and the Epsv5 series is for memory-intensive Linux workloads.[50] They provide up to 64 vCPUs, include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbit/s networking, and high-performance local SSD storage.[51]
In 2022, Microsoft's Ampere Altra-based Azure servers became the first cloud solution provider server to be Arm SystemReady SR certified.[52] The Azure VMs, powered by Altra processors, were also the first to be SystemReady Virtual Environment standard certified. SystemReady defines a set of firmware and hardware standards as a baseline for system development for software developers, original equipment vendors, and chipmakers.[52]
References
[edit ]- ^ "Former Intel President at Reins in ARM Chip Startup". Data Center Knowledge. 2018年02月05日. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ Spencer, Malia (December 9, 2024). "Ampere's Renée James tells Leadership Summit: 'We can do better'". Portland Business Journal .
- ^ Burt, Jeffrey (2022年03月02日). "Designing Chips With The Cloud And Edge In Mind". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2022年10月06日.
- ^ Clarke, Peter (2018年02月05日). "Former Intel exec leads high-performance processor startup". EENewsEurope. Retrieved 2022年10月07日.
- ^ Clark, Don (2018年02月05日). "She Was No. 2 at Intel. Now She's Taking Aim at the Chip Maker" . The New York Times . Archived from the original on 2020年11月09日.
- ^ Spencer, Malia (2022年04月12日). "Former Intel president Renee James' semiconductor startup company files for an IPO". American City Business Journals .
- ^ a b Cutress, Ian (2019年04月15日). "Ampere Computing: Arm is Now an Investor". AnandTech . Archived from the original on April 18, 2019.
- ^ "StackPath". www.electronicdesign.com. 13 April 2022. Retrieved 2022年09月06日.
- ^ "Former Intel president Renee James' semiconductor startup company files for an IPO". www.bizjournals.com. Retrieved 2022年09月06日.
- ^ Levy, Ari (2019年09月27日). "Oracle discloses 40ドル million stake in Ampere, a chip start-up founded by former Intel president Renee James". CNBC. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ Cutress, Ian (2019年12月23日). "80-Core N1 Next-Gen Ampere, 'QuickSilver': The Anti-Graviton2". AnandTech . Archived from the original on June 30, 2020.
- ^ "NVIDIA Brings CUDA to Arm, Enabling New Path to Exascale Supercomputing". NVIDIA Newsroom (Press release). June 17, 2019. Retrieved January 27, 2025.
- ^ Santo, Brian (2019年11月18日). "Nvidia Delivers on Promise to Support Arm". EE Times .
- ^ a b "Ampere's 128-Core Processor Challenges Intel and AMD in a Cloud-Based Processor Showdown - News". www.allaboutcircuits.com. Retrieved 2020年12月31日.
- ^ Mann, Tobias (4 March 2020). "Ampere Targets Intel, AMD With Cloud-First Chips, Oracle Partnership". sdxcentral.
- ^ "Ampere's Arm Data Center Chips Come to Oracle Cloud". Data Center Knowledge. 2020年09月30日. Retrieved 2021年01月12日.
- ^ Martin, Dylan (2020年11月23日). "The 10 Hottest Semiconductor Startups Of 2020". CRN. Retrieved 2024年12月07日.
- ^ Trueman, Charlotte (2022年04月05日). "Microsoft launches Azure VMs powered by new Ampere Altra Arm-based chips". Network World. Retrieved 2022年08月02日.
- ^ AIT News Desk (2021年07月29日). "Ampere To Acquire OnSpecta To Accelerate AI Inference On Cloud-Native Applications". AiThority. Retrieved 2025年01月27日.
- ^ Nishant, Niket (2022年04月11日). "Chipmaker Ampere confidentially files for U.S. IPO". Reuters .
- ^ a b Burke, Steven (2022年06月28日). "Processor Power Play: HPE Puts Ampere ARM On ProLiant". CRN. Retrieved 2022年07月21日.
- ^ "Why Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud love Ampere Computing's server chips". Tech Monitor. 2022年08月02日. Retrieved 2022年08月30日.
- ^ Novet, Jordan; CNBC; Butts, Dylan; Cnbc • • (2025年03月19日). "SoftBank to acquire chip designer Ampere in 6ドル.5 billion deal". NBC Los Angeles. Retrieved 2025年03月20日.
- ^ King, Ian (November 25, 2025). "SoftBank Completes Acquisition of Chipmaker Ampere Computing". Bloomberg News.
- ^ a b c "Microsoft Finally Brings ARM-Based VMs to Azure". The New Stack. 2022年04月15日. Retrieved 2022年08月11日.
- ^ a b "X-Gene 3 gets a second chance at Ampere with a new 32-core 16 nm ARM processor". WikiChip Fuse. 2018年02月05日. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ Cutress, Ian. "Ampere eMAG in the Cloud: 32 Arm Core Instance for 1ドル/hr". www.anandtech.com. Archived from the original on March 29, 2019. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ "Living he Arm Server Dream". www.packet.com. Archived from the original on March 5, 2020. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ "Ampere Ships First Gen ARM Server Processors". WikiChip Fuse. 2018年09月19日. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ a b Desai, Alap Naik (24 March 2020). "Ampere Altra Is First ARM-based 64-bit Server Processor, Packs 80 Cores, Challenging Intel Xeon And AMD EPYC - Appuals.com". Appuals. Retrieved 2022年08月11日.
- ^ a b Kennedy, Patrick (2020年03月03日). "Ampere Altra Launched with 80 Arm Cores for the Cloud". ServeTheHome. Retrieved 2020年03月05日.
- ^ a b Cutress, Dr Ian. "Next Generation Arm Server: Ampere's Altra 80-core N1 SoC for Hyperscalers against Rome and Xeon". www.anandtech.com. Archived from the original on March 3, 2020. Retrieved 2020年03月05日.
- ^ "Ampere Gears Up to Launch 7 nm, 80-Core Arm Chip for Cloud Data Centers". Data Center Knowledge. 2019年11月22日. Retrieved 2019年11月23日.
- ^ "Ampere Altra Max 128-core server processor available as company lays out 5 nm roadmap". ZDNet. Retrieved 2022年08月11日.
- ^ Comment, Sebastian Moss (25 June 2020). "Ampere unveils 128 core Altra Max Arm chip". www.datacenterdynamics.com. Retrieved 2022年08月18日.
- ^ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2020年06月24日). "Ampere Reveals "Quicksilver" Altra Lineup, 128-Core "Mystique" Kicker". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2022年09月13日.
- ^ Francisco Pires (2022年02月16日). "Ampere, Rigetti to Accelerate Hybrid Quantum Computing in HPC Environments". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 2022年09月13日.
- ^ "Oracle Cloud Claims Arm Video Performance Advantage Over x86 Chips". Data Center Knowledge - News and analysis for the data center industry. 2021年06月03日. Retrieved 2022年08月18日.
- ^ a b Cutress, Dr Ian. "Ampere Goes Quantum: Get Your Qubits in the Cloud". www.anandtech.com. Archived from the original on February 16, 2022. Retrieved 2022年09月08日.
- ^ a b Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2022年05月27日). "Ampere Roadmap Has Four Future Arm Server Chips". The Next Platform. Retrieved 2022年09月27日.
- ^ Craig Hale (2023年04月10日). "Ampere's new workstation could bring in a whole new dawn for developers". TechRadar. Retrieved 2023年05月17日.
- ^ "Ampere updates roadmap, heads to 256 cores". Network World. Retrieved 2024年07月25日.
- ^ "Ampere to integrate its CPUs with Qualcomm's cloud-based AI chips for running large models". SiliconANGLE. 2024年05月16日. Retrieved 2024年07月25日.
- ^ "Now in preview: Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors". 2022年04月04日. Retrieved 2022年05月04日.
- ^ "Ampere A1 Compute". 2021年05月21日. Retrieved 2022年05月04日.
- ^ a b Patel, Dylan (2022年06月01日). "Is Ampere Computing's Cloud Native Marketing Fluff? – Siryn Ampere One 5nm Architecture, Cost Analysis, and IPO Analysis". SemiAnalysis. Archived from the original on 2022年09月21日. Retrieved 2022年09月21日.
- ^ Martin, Dylan. "Ampere: Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm processors are ready". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2022年09月29日.
- ^ "Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors". 2022年07月13日. Retrieved 2022年07月13日.
- ^ Nellis, Stephen (2021年05月19日). "Ampere announces custom computing cores as it courts cloud customers". Reuters. Retrieved 2022年08月18日.
- ^ a b Martin, Dylan. "Microsoft offers Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm processors". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2022年09月01日.
- ^ "Microsoft brings Arm support to Azure virtual machines". ZDNET. Retrieved 2022年09月29日.
- ^ a b Mann, Tobias. "Arm, Microsoft say arch can be trusted with real server work". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2022年09月09日.
External links
[edit ]- 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
- Cloud computing
- Computer companies of the United States
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- The Carlyle Group companies
- 2025 mergers and acquisitions
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