Renée James, former Intel president, launches new chip company

Ampere will take on Intel with custom 64-bit ARM cores intended for high-end servers

Renée James, a former president of chip giant Intel, has revealed that she is behind a new chip company called Ampere, which is developing ARM-based server chips intended for "hyperscale" data centres.

The new chip is a custom core ARM v8-A 64-bit server operating at up to 3.3 GHz with 1TB of memory at a power envelope of 125 watts.

When asked by TechCrunch what it was that motivated her to start a new company, she said that she "saw an opportunity" to do something that had not had been done and she decided to take on the challenge

"You're only done until the next great thing is done, then you're not done anymore," she said.

While pricing and more details about the specifications are yet to be unveiled, James claimed that it would offer "unsurpassed price and performance that would exceed any high performance computing chip" out there.

The new chip company also has a number of other products in the pipeline, James revealed, but she's remaining even more tight-lipped about them. They will, apparently, be unveiled "in the future", but she didn't even hint as to when.

Ampere is backed by private equity firm Carlyle Group, where James has worked in the past (albeit briefly) after leaving chip giant Intel. The level of funding for the company has also not been undisclosed, but James mentioned it was "significantly well capitalised".

Ampere is based in Santa Clara, California and actually launched in early 2017. It is by no means a startup in the traditional sense, either, as James noted it already has between 300 and 400 employees currently working there.

"This isn't a garage startup," she said, adding that the chips are in the sampling stage right now with customers and partners, and will go into production later this year. She also declined to reveal what other computer companies will be taking advantage of Ampere's semiconductor tech.