Ampere® Altra® Family 64-Bit Multi-Core Processors

Designed to meet the requirements of modern Cloud Native Computing environments, the Ampere® Altra® Family are an innovative architectural family of Cloud Native Processors designed to be:

High Performance and Predictable

Elastic and Scalable

Power Efficient and Sustainable

The Ampere Altra Family includes products that provide efficient computing solutions for a variety of computing needs from power and space-constrained embedded devices to edge Computing installations to the digital Enterprise and Hyperscale Data Centers.

Features Specific to Core Count

Ampere Altra Family Common Features

Private Caches

L2: 1 MB per Core

L1: 64K Instruction and 64K Data per Core

Cloud Native Features

Single Threaded Cores

Consistent Frequency up to 3.0 GHz

2x128b Vector Units, FP16, Int16, Int8

Advanced Power Management, Dynamic Estimation, Voltage droop detection

System Features

Interrupt Virtualization (GICv3)

IO Virtualization (SMMUv3, SRIOV)

Enterprise RAS: SECDED ECC protected memory throughout

Coherent Mesh Interconnect with distributed snoop filtering

Memory

8 Channels 72-bit DDR4-3200 with ECC

Up to 16 DIMMs (2DPC) and 4 TB total memory

Connectivity

128 Lanes PCIe Gen4 (optional 64 lane CCIX for multi-socket support)

Other Specifications

Instruction Set Compatibility: Armv8.2+, SBSA 4

Independent System and Power Controllers (SMpro and PMpro)

PCBA System Support: I2C, GPIO, QSPI and GPI Interrupt Support, System and Watchdog Timer Support

Operating Junction Temperature Range: 0°C to 90°C

Process: TSMC 7 nm FinFET

Socket Compatible Packages: 4926-Pin FCLGA

High Performance and Predictable

The Ampere Altra Family offers products from 32 cores to 128 cores operating at a consistent and predictable frequency of up to 3.0 GHz. Each core is single-threaded by design with its own 64 KB L1 Instruction-cache, 64 KB L1 Data-cache, and a huge 1 MB L2 private cache.

Large private caching, consistent operating frequency, and single threaded cores combine to deliver predictable performance mitigating noisy neighbor challenges in multi-core processing architectures while providing a very secure microarchitecture for multi-tenant cloud environments.

A coherent mesh interconnect provides efficient bandwidth with 32 distributed home nodes and directory-based snoop filters to enable seamless connectivity between the cores.

Supporting eight 72-bit DDR4-3200 channels, Ampere Altra Family processors offer leading memory bandwidth and a large addressable space up to 4 TB of memory.

Elastic and Scalable

Using industry leading power efficiency per core, the Ampere Altra family provides high performance processing products from 32 cores to 128 cores providing the scalability to deploy dense compute from the most power and space-constrained environments in devices at the edge to the most demanding compute installations on the planet in hyperscale data centers.

Dense Cloud Native Processors deliver the most cores per rack, maximize the number of servers per rack, and provide the highest performance per rack for the most sustainable and power-efficient computing installations in the industry.

The Ampere Altra Family provides consistent incremental performance on a per core basis. Workloads scale linearly as more processes are added to the single threaded cores. For dense virtual machine implementations, more VMs can be provisioned on Ampere Altra Family high core count processors than other competing processors.

With up to 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4 per socket, the Ampere Altra Family provides the flexibility to add up to 48 off-chip devices, including networking cards, storage/NVMe devices, GPUs, and other accelerators. Ampere Altra platforms are well suited to a variety of system configurations supporting high performance networking, AI inference, large capacity storage, and cloud gaming applications.

Power Efficient and Sustainable

The Ampere Altra Family leads the industry in performance per rack allowing operators and IT designers an unprecedented compute capacity for power and space-constrained environments. This advantage reduces rack and floor space, trims power requirements for operational efficiency, and saves money. Carbon footprints are drastically reduced allowing managers to meet aggressive ESG goals and shorten the time to Net-Zero emissions initiatives.

The most power-efficient products in the Ampere Altra Family allow Cloud Native workloads at scale to reduce power consumption by up to 3X over the legacy x86 ecosystem. This efficiency can reduce any operational IT budget by 10s to 100s of millions of dollars.

Up to a third of the space and equipment required to rack and sustain a server infrastructure can be saved by using Ampere Altra Family processors. The space savings also reduce embodied carbon, further adding to the sustainability benefits of using Ampere enabled compute platforms.

Ampere Altra Family Products