AMD reveals its first ARM processor: 8-core Opteron A1100
AMD announced plans to build ARM server CPUs back in 2012. Today the company took a big step towards making those chips a reality, announcing that an 8-core ARM System-on-Chip would begin sampling in March.
Codenamed "Seattle," the processors will be branded Opteron A-series and built on a 28 nm process. The first of these will be the A1100. This will have 4 or 8 cores based on ARM's Cortex-A57 design. This is a high performance, 64-bit ARM core, and it will run at clock speeds of at least 2 GHz. The chips will have up to 4MB of level 2 cache and 8MB of level 3 cache, with both caches shared across all the cores. They'll support dual channel DDR3 or DDR4, with up to 128GB RAM. The chips will also include a bunch of connectivity: eight PCIe 3 lanes, eight SATA 3 ports, and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Rounding out the SoCs, they'll also include dedicated engines for cryptography and compression. The whole thing has an expected power usage of 25W.
