Ampere Computing

Ampere Computing is a semiconductor company founded in 2017 that designs high-performance, energy-efficient processors specifically for cloud computing and data center markets. The company's product lineup centers on custom Arm-based processors tailored for cloud-native environments, emphasizing features such as high core counts, scalability, and low power consumption. Ampere's processors are designed to efficiently handle increasing workloads of modern data centers and cloud infrastructure, addressing performance, efficiency, and scalability challenges faced by today's data centers.

Ampere's product portfolio includes the Altra and Altra Max processors, introduced in 2020 and 2021 respectively, featuring 80 and 128 cores. In May 2023, Ampere unveiled its latest AmpereOne processor family, which includes up to 192 single-threaded custom cores - the highest core count in the industry at the time. The AmpereOne processor is built on a 5nm process node and incorporates eight channels of DDR5 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen5 IO. This new processor family aims to provide increased performance, scalability, and efficiency compared to its predecessors.

Ampere's processors are designed to offer both high performance and energy efficiency, with the company claiming significant advantages over competitors in terms of performance per watt and performance per dollar. For instance, Ampere has reported that its processors outperform AMD's 3rd Generation EPYC "Milan" CPUs by 3.6 times in inference workloads and offer a six times advantage in performance per dollar compared to Intel's 3rd Generation "Ice Lake" CPUs.

The company's focus on efficiency and performance has attracted attention from major cloud service providers. As of 2023, Ampere's processors have been adopted by several leading cloud platforms, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba, and Tencent. Additionally, server manufacturers such as HPE and Supermicro have incorporated Ampere's processors into their product lines.