AMD debuts first ARM processor

[Lurker]

The company, which announced in September it would be manufacturing 64-bit ARM processors, demonstrated a prototype of its new processor at a summit for the Open Compute Project (OCP) this week in San Jose, California.

The pending AMD ARM processors, which will be under the AMD Opteron A1100 Series (or “A-series”) nameplate, will be manufactured using 28-nanometer fabrication technology.

 

Based on the ARM Cortex A57 core design, the AMD Opteron A1100 Series processors will come in either four- or eight-core configurations, with 64GB DRAM. They will have up to 4MB of shared L2 and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and configurable dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory channels with error correcting code that can run up to 1,866 MT (million transfers) per second.

 

The processors will be built on a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design and will feature eight lanes of PCI-Express Generation 3 I/O, eight Serial ATA 3 ports and two 10 Gigabit ethernet ports. They will also have encryption/decryption and data compression co-processors, and up to four SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMM memory modules.

 

The AMD Opteron A-Series development kit is in effect a sample bare-bones computer running on the ARM processor. It includes a Micro-ATX-sized motherboard, four DIMM slots that can hold up to 128GB of DDR3 DRAM, PCI Express connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports, and eight Serial-ATA connectors.

 

On the software side, the development kits will have a Fedora ARM Linux distribution, with device drivers and commonly used Web tier applications such as the Apache Web server, MySQL database engine, and the PHP, Java 7 and Java 8 programming languages. It also includes the standard Linux GNU tool chain for developing applications. It is booted through a standard UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) secure boot environment.

 

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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2092680/amd-debuts-first-arm-processor.html