Ampere Computing on Tuesday quietly added several new processors to its AmpereOne family without a formal announcement or press briefings. The quiet release comes after the company was bought by Softbank. The new AmpereOne M CPUs feature a 12-channel DDR5 memory subsystem and are aimed at applications that require more memory capacity as well as bandwidth. The new CPUs feature from 96 to 192 cores and require new motherboards.
The AmpereOne M CPU family uses a 7228-pin FCLGA socket and includes six processors with 96, 144, 160, and 192 single-threaded custom Armv8.6+ cores operating at up to 3.60 GHz and equipped with a 2MB L2 cache.
The processors also feature 64 MB of system level cache. The key feature of the new CPUs compared to their predecessors is their 12-channel memory subsystem, which supports a maximum of one DIMM per channel and up to 3TB of addressable DDR5-5600 capacity. The memory subsystem is ECC-protected using SECDED and Symbol ECC to make it suitable for cloud datacenter workloads.
When it comes to power consumption, AmpereOne M processors consume up to 348W, and to keep their power consumption in check, these CPUs support a combination of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, adaptive voltage control, and fine-grained thermal sensors.
On the I/O front, the processor supports 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes with bifurcation capabilities down to x4 and has 24 device controllers to connect multiple accelerators, SSDs, network cards, and other high-performance components needed in AI and cloud deployments.
Ampere's AmpereOne M processors are still made on TSMC's N5 process technology, just like their predecessors, so the additional memory channels are indeed the key feature of the new CPUs. These processors can process up to 192 threads per socket, which is lower compared to AMD's 192-core EPYC 9965 CPUs, which support simultaneous multi-threading and therefore can process up to 384 threads simultaneously.
But perhaps, the purpose of AmpereOne M is not only to offer support for 3TB of memory for interested parties in the AI space, but rather to set the stage for the company's next-generation AmperOne MX processors that will feature 256 cores and 12 DDR5 memory channels. This upcoming CPU will be made on TSMC's N3 manufacturing process and therefore will add both features and performance efficiency to its list of advantages.
