It is no secret that AMD plans to release SoCs (system on a chip) featuring ARM processor cores and that AMD and ARM have been collaborating on various projects for quite some time. A few months ago, AMD even released its low-power Beema and Mullins processors, which included on-die ARM-based Platform Security Processors which leverage the industry standard ARM TrustZone system security framework. Just yesterday though, AMD announced that it had made available development kits featuring AMD’s first 64-bit ARM-based processor, formerly codenamed “Seattle.”
The AMD Opteron A1100 Series development kit as it is known, provides the hardware and software necessary to begin application development and evaluate AMD Opteron A1100 Series processors. This a huge deal because the availability of the kit makes AMD is the only provider to offer the standard ARM Cortex-A57 technology and 64-bit ARM server hardware with complete ARMv8 instruction set support.
“The journey toward a more efficient infrastructure for large-scale datacenters is taking a major step forward today with broader availability of our AMD Opteron A1100-Series development kit,” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, general manager and vice president, Server business unit, AMD. “After successfully sampling to major ecosystem partners such as firmware, OS, and tools providers, we are taking the next step in what will be a collaborative effort across the industry to reimagine the datacenter based on the open business model of ARM innovation.”
AMD becomes the first provider to offer standard ARM Cortex-A57 technology and 64-bit ARM server hardware with complete ARMv8 instruction set support.
The AMD Opteron A1100 Series “Seattle” processors offer 4 or 8 ARM Cortex-A57 cores with up to 4 MB of shared L2 and 8 MB of shared L3 cache. The platform is configurable with dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory channels, with ECC support, at speeds up to 1866 MT/second. There are also 8 lanes of PCI-Express Gen 3 connectivity, 8 SATA III ports, dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and cryptographic and data compression co-processors.
The actual development kit is built around a microATX motherboard, equipped with a quad-core AMD Opteron A1100-Series processor, two registered DDR3 DIMMs totaling 16GB, configurable PCI Express connectors with a single x8 or dual x4 ports, and eight SATA connectors. The platform uses off-the-shelf power supplies and offers a standard UEFI boot environment.
In terms of software, the dev kit runs a version of Linux based on Fedora technology from the
AMD’s vision for this technology is to enable highly-efficient, high-density server arrays targeted at web/cloud hosting, multi-media delivery, and data analytics. Of course, these are all things AMD could accomplish with it x86 cores as well, but not quite in the same power envelopes. Software and hardware developers as well as early adopters in large datacenters are eligible to receive AMD Opteron A1100 Series and can apply on AMD’s website. Total cost—$2999.
