OREANDA-NEWS. January 18, 2016. AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) marks a major step toward delivering choice and innovation in the datacenter with the launch of the AMD Opteron™ A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), formerly codenamed "Seattle." Jointly with its software and hardware partners, AMD is accelerating time-to-deployment of ARM®-based systems and driving forward ecosystem support for ARM in the datacenter.

"The ecosystem for ARM in the datacenter is approaching an inflection point, and the addition of AMD's high-performance processor is another strong step forward for customers looking for a datacenter-class ARM solution," said

Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, Enterprise Solutions, AMD. "The macro trend of convergence between networking, storage and servers is an important catalyst in this evolution. Customers now have access to 64-bit ARM processors from the only silicon provider that also has decades of experience delivering professional enterprise and embedded products."

The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC represents a key milestone for establishing ARM in the datacenter as well. "The AMD Opteron A1100 processor brings a new choice in scalability across network infrastructure and datacenters," said Lakshmi Mandyam, director of server systems and ecosystems, ARM. "AMD brings recognized expertise in the server and embedded markets, making them an ideal partner to deliver a 64-bit ARM processor with the impressive balance of performance and power-efficiency to address an increasingly diverse set of workloads."

The AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC is the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. Utilizing ARM Cortex®-A57 processors with high-speed network and storage connectivity and outstanding energy efficiency, the AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC delivers a balanced total cost of ownership for storage, Web and networking workloads.

AMD Opteron A1100 Series SoC specifications:

  • Up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 4MB shared Level 2 and 8MB of shared Level 3 cache
  • 2x 64-bit DDR3/DDR4 channels supporting up to 1866 MHz with ECC
  • 2x 10Gb Ethernet network connectivity
  • 8-lane PCI-Express® Gen 3
  • 14 SATA-3 ports

The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC is powering enterprise-class systems from SoftIron with its Overdrive 3000 system for developers, as well as an upcoming lineup of software-defined storage solutions taking advantage of the processor's rich feature set.

"The secret of the AMD Opteron A1100 SoC's appeal is not just the cores, it's everything around the cores," said

Norman Fraser, CEO of SoftIron. "If you've got an application where you need to move large amounts of data around quickly, you're going to love it."

AMD is also collaborating with Silver Lining Systems (SLS) to integrate SLS' fabric technology in innovative dense server designs featuring the Opteron A1100 Series, targeted at streaming, Web and storage workloads for cloud and hyperscale datacenters. The SLS Fabric Interconnect incorporates a low-latency, energy-efficient 60Gbps switching fabric and is available as a PCI Express® expansion card or a standalone ASIC for custom server applications.

"We are very excited about working with AMD to bring power-efficient, fabric-based computing to market," said Dr.

Ping-Kank Hsiung, managing director of Silver Lining Systems. "Combining the efficient AMD Opteron A1100 processor with our unique fabric will help drive down costs and power requirements of hyperscale computing and storage."

In addition to silicon innovation, AMD has been instrumental in supporting the 64-bit ARM software ecosystem, a critical component to any new processor, and has been working closely with Enterprise Linux® leaders Red Hat and SUSE on operating system and application support.

"Red Hat and AMD share a vision of building an open, standards-based software ecosystem for highly converged designs based on 64-bit ARM architecture. As one of the first participants in Red Hat's ARM Partner Early Access Program, AMD has been instrumental in the testing and porting of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform to 64-bit ARM architecture," said

Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage, Red Hat. "The arrival of the AMD Opteron A1100 SoC represents a major milestone to the ecosystem interested in driving converged infrastructure for storage, networking and compute."

The AMD Opteron A1100 SoC has been in advanced development with technology partners and customers for several quarters and is available in mass production quantities today.

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SUSE

"SUSE has been collaborating with AMD hardware partners to bring storage solutions to market featuring SUSE Enterprise Storage software. We are excited for the introduction of the AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor, as it is an ideal fit for storage workloads and provides strong evidence that the ARM enterprise ecosystem is rapidly maturing."

-- Ralf Flaxa, Vice President of Engineering

Netzyn

"The Netzyn Application Streaming Platform (NzASP) was designed for service providers and app vendors to deploy at scale, supporting tens of thousands of servers and tens of millions of app instances. After evaluating the AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor, we found it to provide compelling performance and power efficiency for many of our streaming applications, and we look forward to continued collaboration with AMD and their hardware partners to deliver innovative solutions to our customers."

--

Steve Bakke, Founder and CTO

Qosmos

"As a market leader for deep packet inspection and network function virtualization architectures, we're always looking for more capable computing solutions. The AMD Opteron A1100 processor is a natural fit, as its ARM cores can be coupled tightly to network interface controllers in silicon, which enables optimized NFV as a configurable hardware option to help reduce complexity and cost."

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Imran Yusuf, Vice President of Business Development & Strategic Alliances

CASwell

"The AMD Opteron A1100 platform provides CASwell with excellent performance and versatility for Network Function Virtualization (NFV). From our evaluation of the AMD Opteron A1100 platform, we found its 64-bit ARM compute performance, memory bandwidth and multiple 10Gb Ethernet interfaces ideally suited for this demanding workload. CASwell is an innovator and is pleased to be working with AMD in bringing 64-bit ARM to the data center, and sees the AMD Opteron A1100 Series as the foundation of our NFV products."

--

Thomas Lee, Vice President of New Business Division