Ampere has a ton of new information to share today. That includes the AmpereOne Pricing and SKU list as well as the OEMs supporting the new chip. We are breaking the announcements up into a few logical blocks. We will next cover the AmpereOne Aurora 512-core AI-infused part. We will also go into the architecture and Ampere’s performance figures for AmpereOne a bit more. For now, let us get to the pricing and the OEMs selling the parts.
Ampere AmpereOne Pricing and SKU List
Here is the list. Very notably, the price for the 192-core part is significantly higher than we have seen from the 128-core Ampere Altra Max. We know that a motherboard with Altra Max 128 core sells for $2500 combined (via Newegg Affiliate Link), so the pricing is much higher at over $5000 for the 192 core parts.
Ampere also has lower-core count, but higher clock speed parts at over $4700. These seem to be clocked too low to compare to true workstation processors like the AMD Threadripper/ Threadripper Pro and Intel Xeon W but might make an interesting foray into that space for some folks. The AmpereOne A144-26X at 2.6GHz is only $2936. Given the Usage Power, which is NOT TDP, it seems like it is sucking a lot of power to hit that, which usually means it is lower binned silicon running at a higher voltage.
Previously, Ampere had the Altra/ Altra Max family at 128 cores and below. Now the AmpereOne family is reaching to 96 and 128 cores. We also note that compared to the initial Ampere Continuum slide, we no longer see 136 and 176 core parts on this new published SKU list.
Usually, that happens in SKU stacks when we see companies announce a set of SKUs, but then market demand focuses the SKU stack in other directions.
AmpereOne Platforms
The AmpereOne platforms are super interesting. Ampere highlighted Supermicro, Gigabyte, ASRock Rack, IEIT, and BYD here.
Gigabyte has focused a lot on Arm server chips for years, so that is what we would expect. We first saw Supermicro systems at Computex 2023. At the same show, we saw Gigabyte’s 8-channel and 12-channel DDR5 AmpereOne designs.
We saw a Hyve AmpereOne platform a few months ago.
HPE and Wiwynn are still notably missing from the list. We reviewed the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 and the Wiwynn Mt. Jade, so not seeing those vendors on the AmpereOne OEM list feels a bit confusing. Also, let us just say that Dell needs an Ampere-powered server at this point.
Of course, we hope to see more manufacturers jump in as we get to the 12-channel platforms. AmpereOne is less expensive than the NVIDIA Grace Superchip for anyone looking to get into Arm servers that are more modern than the Altra Max.
Final Words
Ampere AmpereOne parts are still considerably less than the Intel Xeon 6700E series “Sierra Forest,” where the top bins have list prices more than twice that of what Ampere is charging. Likewise, if you just want higher-core count Arm parts, Ampere is much less expensive than NVIDIA Grace. It would be nice, however, to see more OEMs join the AmpereOne Arm server market. More servers mean that more deployments and use cases are covered.
Hopefully we will get AmpereOne systems soon to test.
