AMD recently revealed a few new bits of information at Hot Chips in Cupertino, California on their new AMD Opteron A1100 processor. This is one of the 64-bit ARM releases that we have been eagerly awaiting. Two weeks ago we wrote about the development board being (finally) available for sale.
Head over to Tom’s IT Pro for my overview piece on the ARM platform.
First off, the overview slide AMD is presenting:
One will notice a few key features such as integrated dual 10 gigabit Ethernet, PCIe 3.0 and 8x SATA III lanes. Memory is dual channel with 128GB possible. Looking at the AMD Opteron A1100 floorplan, one can see that the 8MB of L3 cache is at the center of the design. Furthermore the L3 and L2 caches take up a high proportion of total die area in this design.
The Cryptographic Coprocessor is a big deal these days. Companies such as Google are some of the primary drivers of 64-bit ARM alternatives. The company is now securing data end-to-end through encryption. Having low power cores with dedicated crypto offload is a big power/ performance saver.
We certainly will need to test to see how well this work. Specifically, can the CCP handle encryption fast enough for the dual 10 gigabit Ethernet links.
AMD Opteron System Control Processor
The SCP is basically the AMD Opteron platform’s remote power management and Serial-over-LAN feature. It is onboard so there is no need for a separate chip like we see in Intel servers.
RGMII gets its own 1GbE link much like we see with traditional BMC components. We asked if it is IPMI 2.0 compatible and AMD said it would be. We also asked if there was a remote iKVM like feature and were told it would be serial-over-LAN only.
Overall this is great to see. I also asked an Intel source last week when I would see the BMC integrated onto its products. The source smiled in response which we are taking as a no comment.
We will have a bit more on the AMD Opteron A1100 in the coming days. For now, you can see the longer Tom’s IT Pro article for an overview of the platform.
Here are some of the key slides from AMD’s presentation on its new ARM chip.
What is the TDP on this? Why no ip kvm?
Do these have GPUs? I do not see them on there. This is AMD man. APU all the way and even phones have GPUs with their ARM chips
@Kooni these are cloud chips not typical architecture chips
These are server chips are they don’t need any of the things you mentioned. The only reason they exist in x86 servers is because of the braindead legacy BIOS and because some people want to run Windows on their servers.
These are about 25W TDP.