AMD Announces Availability of their $3,000 Opteron A1100-Series 64-bit ARM Development Kit

AMD Opteron A1100 Server SoCs, codenamed “Seattle”, come with four to eight ARM Cortex A57 cores, and earlier this year, the company unveiled both the processors and a development kit. You can now apply for “AMD Opteron A1100 Series 64-bit ARM developers kit”, and if you’re selected, you’ll “just” need to pay $2,999 to receive the board and related tools. The kit targets software and hardware developers, as well as early adopters in large datacenters. AMD Opteron A1100 Board hardware specifications: SoC – ARM Opeteron A1000 with 4 ARM Cortex-A57 cores System Memory – 2x Registered DIMM with 16 GB of DDR3 DRAM (upgradeable to 128GB) Storage – 8 Serial-ATA connectors Connectivity – Not mentioned, but there seems to be an RJ45 port on the pic, and another SFP cage, both probably 10 Gbit Ethernet since it’s the speed supported by Opteron A1100. Expansion slots – PCI Express connectors configurable […]

ARM Unveils Server Base System Architecture Specification (SBSA) to Standardize ARM based Servers

64-bit ARM based servers should hit the market later this year or earlier in 2015 with SoCs such as Applied Micro X-Gene or AMD Opteron A1100. ARM still has the lead in terms of efficiency with a lower dollar per watt ratio, but Intel is closing in with their new Avoton server-on-chips. However, there’s one aspect where Intel is clearly in the lead: standardization and compatibility. ARM is very flexible, and allow SoC designers to create more or less what they want, but it comes at the cost that most ARM based systems are not capable of running mainline Linux, and instead use vendor trees.  With many applications, that may not be critical, but when it comes to data-centers, companies want to be able to run the latest Linux version with the latest security patches as soon as possible, and want to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), so […]

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