AMD details Seattle ARM server chips in 2014 roadmap

AMD believes its server heritage will give it an advantage when Seattle ships next year

AMD has spilled the beans on its server roadmap for 2014, including details of its first ARM-based Opteron chip codenamed Seattle, along with new x86 parts codenamed Warsaw and Berlin, the latter of which will be the first to feature uniform memory access across CPU and GPU cores.

Seattle is set to sample to system vendors in the first quarter of 2014 and should be shipping in production servers by the second half of the year, according to AMD.

The chip will initially have eight 64-bit cores based on ARM's Cortex-A57 design, with sixteen core versions planned for the future. It will have a clock speed of 2GHz or higher, integrated Freedom Fabric interconnect links and support for up to 64GB of memory.

AMD sees a great opportunity for ARM chips in applications such as cloud services, where high density of discrete servers and low power consumption are at least as important as processing power, and believes it has advantages over other firms building ARM server chips.

"There are others that have more ARM experience than we do, but they have little experience on the server side," said Andrew Feldman, head of AMD's Data Centre Server Solutions team and former chief executive of SeaMicro before AMD acquired it last year.

"Of all the ARM licensees, not only do we have the most experience, we are the only ones with server IP blocks. We've got the memory controller, we've got the I/O blocks, we've got the compression, the encryption, and we've got the RAS [reliability, availability, and serviceability] features. These are all blocks of logic we have that have already been deployed in millions of servers," Feldman explained.

Next year will be a "tyre-kicking year" for ARM-based servers, but "you will also see one of the major internet brands announce a full port [to ARM]," Feldman predicted. However, AMD is not neglecting its x86 Opteron line, and next year will see the introduction of parts codenamed Berlin and Warsaw.

Berlin will be a single-socket server chip based on AMD's Steamroller CPU core combined with AMD's "Graphics Core Next" GPU. It targets high performance computing clusters, where the on-chip GPU eliminates the need for discrete GPU cards or processors.

Due in the first half of 2014, Berlin features four CPU cores and is expected to deliver double the performance and double the memory capacity as AMD's Opteron X-Series announced last month.

As a system-on-a-chip, Berlin will integrate functions such as PCI Express, USB and Sata ports. Berlin will also be the first server chip to implement uniform memory access for both CPU and GPU cores, which greatly simplifies coding for both types of core, according to the firm.

Meanwhile, Warsaw is optimised for two and four-socket servers and is effectively a next generation of the Opteron 6300 series, designed to be more cost effective and have lower power consumption.

Warsaw is still based on the Piledriver core like the current chips, and is fully socket compatible, so customers will be able to simply drop a Warsaw chip into the same motherboard socket. The chip is slated for delivery in the first quarter of 2014.