Ampere Computing LLC is an American
fabless
Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...
semiconductor company based in
Santa Clara,
California
California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. It was founded in 2017 by
Renée James.
Ampere has offices in:
Portland, Oregon
Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...
;
Taipei, Taiwan
, nickname = The City of Azaleas
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;
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most populous city in the state (after Charlotte, North Carolina, Charlotte) ...
;
Bangalore, India
Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...
;
Warsaw, Poland
Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland. Its population is officially estimated at 1.86 million residents within a grea ...
; and
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
History
Ampere Computing was founded in the Fall of 2017 by Renée James, ex-President of
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
, with funding from
The Carlyle Group
The Carlyle Group Inc. is an American multinational company with operations in private equity, alternative asset management and financial services. As of 2023, the company had $426 billion of assets under management.
Carlyle specializes in ...
. James acquired a team from
MACOM Technology Solutions (formerly
AppliedMicro) in addition to several industry hires to start the company.
Ampere Computing is an
ARM architecture
ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer, RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for central processing unit, com ...
licensee and develops its own server microprocessors. Ampere fabricates its products at
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...
.
In April 2019, Ampere announced its second major investment round, including investment from
Arm Holdings
Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing ...
and
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...
.
In June 2019,
Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
announced a partnership with Ampere to bring support for
Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). In November 2019, Nvidia announced a reference design platform for
graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated ARM-based servers including Ampere.
In the first half of 2020, Ampere announced Ampere Altra an 80-core and Ampere Altra Max a 128-core processor without the use of simultaneous multithreading.
In March 2020, the company announced a partnership with Oracle. In September of that year, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and
virtual machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...
instances in early 2021 based on Ampere Altra.
In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups by ''
CRN''.
In May 2021, the company announced a partnership with
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
. In July of that year, Ampere acquired OnSpecta, an AI technology startup. After the acquisition, the companies were able to demonstrate four times faster acceleration on Ampere-based instances running AI-inference workloads.
In April 2022, Ampere said that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Its primary purpose is to enforce laws against market m ...
, signaling its intent to go
public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...
.
In June 2022,
HPE announced their Gen11 ProLiant system would use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors.
In July 2022, Google announced T2A instances using Ampere Altra in the Google cloud and in August 2022 Microsoft announced their instances of Ampere running in Azure.
On March 19, 2025, investment holding company
SoftBank Group
is a Japanese multinational investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, that focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services to customers in a m ...
announced it will acquire Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. The deal is set to close in the second half of 2025. Ampere will remain an independent subsidiary with its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Products
Ampere develops ARM-based
computer processor
Cryptominer, In computing and computer science, a processor or processing unit is an electrical component (circuit (computer science), digital circuit) that performs operations on an external data source, usually Memory (computing), memory or som ...
s and CPU cores under their Altra brands.
These are used in databases, media encoding, web services, network acceleration, mobile gaming, AI inference processing, and other applications and programs that need to scale.
On February 5, 2018, Ampere announced the eMAG 8180 featuring 32x Skylark cores fabricated on TSMC's 16FF+ process. It supports a turbo of up to 3.3 GHz with a TDP of 125 W, 8ch 64-bit
DDR4, up to 1 TB
DDR4 per socket, and 42x
PCIe 3.0 Lanes.
The Skylark cores were based on
AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3.
Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking. On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores.
2020
On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80 cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process for hyperscale computing.
It was the first server-grade processor to include 80 cores and the Q80-30 conserves power by running at 161 W in use.
The cores are semi-custom
Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications. It supports a frequency of up to 3.3 GHz with TDP of 250 W, 8ch 72-bit DDR4, up to 4 TB DDR4-3200 per socket, 128x
PCIe 4.0 Lanes, 1 MB
L2 per core and 32 MB SLC.
Ampere also announced their roadmap with Ampere Altra Max (2021) in development and AmpereOne (2022) defined.
2021
The 128-core Altra Max was released in 2021 and targeted hyperscale cloud providers. It uses the same server socket and platforms as Ampere Altra, and both products have one thread per core. The Altra Max CPUs provide 128 Arm v8.2+ cores per chip and run up to 3.0 GHz. They also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4.
Also in 2021, Oracle launched its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere Altra processors.
2022
In February 2022, Ampere and Rigetti Computing announced a strategic partnership to create hybrid quantum-classical computers.
The companies will combine Ampere's Altra Max CPUs with Rigetti's Quantum Processing Units (QPU) in cloud-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.
In April, Microsoft previewed its Azure Virtual Machines running on the Ampere Altra.
The VMs run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open source databases, cloud native .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and other processes.
In May, Ampere announced the sampling of AmpereOne CPUs, 5 nanometer chips based on its in-house Ampere-developed core.
AmpereOne will add support for DDR5 main memory and PCIe Gen5 peripherals.
On June 28, 2022, HPE became first tier-one server provider to offer compute with optimized cloud-native silicon for service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with new line of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers, using Ampere® Altra® and Ampere® Altra® Max processors, delivering high performance and power efficiency.
2023
During April 2023, Ampere released the ''Altra developer's kit,'' an IoT Prototype Kit based on Ampere Altra, aimed at cloud developers, available in 32-core, 64-core, and 80-core formats.
2024
In May 2024, Ampere updated its AmpereOne roadmap to 256 cores and announced a joint effort with Qualcomm on CPUs and accelerators.
Customers
Ampere's customers include
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...
,
Tencent Cloud,
Oracle
An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination.
Descript ...
,
ByteDance
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing ap ...
,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...
(HPE),
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc., is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, ICANN-accredited domain registration, and other se ...
,
Equinix,
Kingsoft Cloud,
Meituan
Meituan ( zh, p=Měituán, c=美团, literally "beautiful group"; formerly Meituan–Dianping, literally "beautiful group–reviews") is a Chinese shopping platform for locally found consumer products and retail services including entertainment ...
,
Scaleway,
UCloud,
Foxconn Industrial Internet,
Gigabyte
The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The SI prefix, prefix ''giga-, giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte i ...
,
Inspur,
Cruise,
Hetzner,
Project Ronin,
Wiwynn and
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...
Cruise uses an Ampere Altra variant for its autonomous driving unit. The CPU was selected because of its throughput and low power consumption.
In 2021, Oracle, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance committed to using Ampere's customized chips, first announced in May. In April 2022, Microsoft previewed Ampere Altra processors in its new Azure D-and E- series virtual machines.
The Dpsv5 series is built for Linux enterprise application types, and the Epsv5 series is for memory-intensive Linux workloads.
They provide up to 64 vCPUs, include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbit/s networking, and high-performance local SSD storage.
In 2022, Microsoft's Ampere Altra-based Azure servers became the first cloud solution provider server to be Arm
SystemReady SR certified.
The Azure VMs, powered by Altra processors, were also the first to be SystemReady Virtual Environment standard certified. SystemReady defines a set of firmware and hardware standards as a baseline for system development for software developers, original equipment vendors, and chipmakers.
References
External links
*
{{Application ARM-based chips
Companies based in Santa Clara, California
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Semiconductor companies of the United States
Fabless semiconductor companies
Technology companies established in 2017
American companies established in 2019
Cloud computing
Computer companies of the United States
Computer hardware companies
The Carlyle Group companies
Announced information technology acquisitions
2017 establishments in California