AMD Reveals Its Opteron A1100 ARM Server Processors, Codename “Seattle”

Today AMD unveiled its Opteron A Series development kit which sports the new Opteron A1100 processor. Unlike every recent AMD processor ever made the Opteron A1100 is unique for one specific reason: it isn’t x86, it is ARM. To date ARM has failed to gain traction in the server market, but AMD hopes to change that by being the first major company to try and push ARM in the server market. AMD’s first development platform is based on a 4 to 8 core Cortex A57 CPUs – these CPUs offer full ARMv8 instruction set support and are 64 bit. The specifications of AMD’s “Seattle” platform are as follows:

• Micro-ATX motheboard
• Up to 16GB of DDR3 memory with conventional DDR3 DIMMs, or up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMM modules (DDR3 and DDR4 support up to 1866MT/s)
• 8 SATA III 6Gbps ports
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
• UEFI BIOS
• PCIe 3.0 x8 or dual x4
• Standard ATX PSU support
• Crypto and data compression co-processors

The price of AMD’s Opteron A Series kit is a hefty $3000, but this is new technology so the cost will likely come down more in the future. For now this is purely an experimental move by AMD as the precursor to something more complete in the future.

End users can apply for early access to AMD’s new dev-kit here.

Source: AMD (YouTube)

Image courtesy of AMD