Ampere has a flagship CPU on its name which is the 128-core Altra Max M128-30 and though it is not the world’s highest-performing processor, the CPU packs an unprecedented number of general-purpose 64-bit cores. It also comes with reasonable power consumption and is priced at a fraction of what AMD and Intel charge for their flagship EPYC and Xeon Scalable offerings.
The OEM charges around $5,800 for its top-of-the-range Altra Max M128-30 processor featuring 128 Arm Neoverse N1 cores that operate at up to 3.0 GHz, 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes, and eight memory channels.
Coming the AMD’s top-of-the-line EPYC 7763 CPU comes with 64 cores that can work at 2.45 GHz – 3.50 GHz is priced at $7,890 and Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8380 processor offers 40 cores functioning at 2.30 GHz – 3.40 GHz costs $8,099.
Ampere also offers its cheapest 32-core Ampere Altra Q32-17 that comes with 32 cores running at 1.70 GHz and 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes. It is priced at $800, which is below AMD’s 16-core EPYC 7302 that costs $978. On the other Intel’s Xeon Silver ‘Ice Lake-SP’ processors cost around $500, but only offer eight cores.
Though we can argue that the cores of Arm’s Neoverse are not as advanced as AMD’s Zen 4 or Intel’s Ice Lake-SP cores, however, they are small enough to pack 128 cores into a chip-consuming no more than 250 watts.
Ampere is not the only company offering Arm-based enterprise-grade processors we even have Oracle and Fujitsu doing the same. The latter’s A64FX processors power Fugaku supercomputer is offering similar chips to various enterprises. Even Huawei will be deploying its Arm-based SoCs primarily in its own data centres.
