Ampere Computing was founded in the Fall of 2017 by Renée James,[6] ex-President of Intel, with funding from The Carlyle Group. James acquired a team from MACOM Technology Solutions (formerly AppliedMicro) in addition to several industry hires to start the company.[7][8][9][10] Ampere Computing is an ARM architecture licensee and develops its own server microprocessors.[11] Ampere fabricates its products at TSMC.[12]
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.[17]
In March 2020, the company announced a partnership with Oracle.[18] In September of that year, Oracle said it would launch bare-metal and virtual machine instances in early 2021 based on Ampere Altra.[19]
In November 2020, Ampere was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups by CRN.[20]
In May 2021, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft.[21] In July of that year, Ampere acquired OnSpecta, an AI technology startup.[22] After the acquisition, the companies were able to demonstrate four times faster acceleration on Ampere-based instances running AI-inference workloads.[citation needed]
In June 2022, HPE announced their Gen11 ProLiant system would use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max Cloud Native Processors.[24]
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.[25]
On March 19, 2025, investment holding company SoftBank Group 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.[26]
Products
Ampere develops ARM-based computer processors and CPU cores under their Altra brands.[17] 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.[27]
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.[28] The Skylark cores were based on AppliedMicro'sX-Gene 3.[28][29] Packet offers servers with the eMAG 8180 and 128 GB DRAM, 480 GB SSD, and 2x 10 Gbit/s networking.[30] On September 19, 2018, Ampere announced the availability of a version featuring 16x Skylark cores.[31]
2020
On March 3, 2020, Ampere announced the Ampere Altra featuring 80 cores fabricated on TSMC's N7 process for hyperscale computing.[32][33][34] It was the first server-grade processor to include 80 cores and the Q80-30 conserves power by running at 161 W in use.[32] The cores are semi-custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores with Ampere modifications.[35] 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.[33][34]
Ampere also announced their roadmap with Ampere Altra Max (2021) in development and AmpereOne (2022) defined.[36]
2021
The 128-core Altra Max was released in 2021 and targeted hyperscale cloud providers.[37] It uses the same server socket and platforms as Ampere Altra, and both products have one thread per core.[38] 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.[39]
Also in 2021, Oracle launched its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere Altra processors.[40]
2022
In February 2022, Ampere and Rigetti Computing announced a strategic partnership to create hybrid quantum-classical computers.[41] The companies will combine Ampere's Altra Max CPUs with Rigetti's Quantum Processing Units (QPU) in cloud-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.[41]
In April, Microsoft previewed its Azure Virtual Machines running on the Ampere Altra.[27] 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.[27]
In May, Ampere announced the sampling of AmpereOne CPUs, 5 nanometer chips based on its in-house Ampere-developed core.[42] AmpereOne will add support for DDR5 main memory and PCIe Gen5 peripherals.[42]
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.[citation needed]
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.[43]
2024
In May 2024, Ampere updated its AmpereOne roadmap to 256 cores [44] and announced a joint effort with Qualcomm on CPUs and accelerators.[45]
Cruise uses an Ampere Altra variant for its autonomous driving unit. The CPU was selected because of its throughput and low power consumption.[48]
In 2021, Oracle, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance committed to using Ampere's customized chips, first announced in May.[51] In April 2022, Microsoft previewed Ampere Altra processors in its new Azure D-and E- series virtual machines.[52] The Dpsv5 series is built for Linux enterprise application types, and the Epsv5 series is for memory-intensive Linux workloads.[52] 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.[53]
In 2022, Microsoft's Ampere Altra-based Azure servers became the first cloud solution provider server to be Arm SystemReady SR certified.[54] 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.[54]
