When you think of data center chips, Intel and AMD probably spring to mind. But up-and-coming Arm chipmaker Ampere is on a conquest to change that. The company aims to be the de facto choice for cloud-native and scale-out workloads, and it’s already making significant headway.

Since launching its first data center chip, the 80-core Ampere Altra, last year, the company has had several high-profile wins including Cloudflare, Equinix, and Oracle. Today, the company added Microsoft to its list of customers, as the cloud giant plans to use Altra to meet its lofty 2030 carbon-neutrality goals, said Jeff Wittich, chief product officer at Ampere.

“Our goal wasn't just to go in and integrate a bunch of [intellectual property] together or prove that we have the chops to go and build a design,” he said. “Our goal is to build the next big CPU company that has a big horizontal customer base.”

For Ampere, this means being talked about in the same breath as Intel and AMD for data center applications, he added.

Much of this attention is the result of the company’s high-core count CPUs, which the company claims deliver comparable if not better performance than that of the competition in workloads optimized for Arm processors.

“One of the common questions we get from people is: 'What runs on Ampere?' And the simple thing is almost everything does,” Wittich said. “There's just no debate anymore whether Arm is viable in the server space and whether it's going to happen.”

This is thanks in part to the rise of Arm-based processors in the data center over the past year. With Amazon’s Graviton 2 and Marvell’s upcoming ThunderX3, the software ecosystem is more robust than ever.

Ampere’s first chips, the Altra and 128-core Altra Max, were based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 architecture and produced on a 7-nanometer node by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). It’s the same architecture used by Amazon in its Graviton 2 chips and in Marvell’s Octeon TX2 infrastructure processors.

Arm’s recently announced Neoverse V1 and N2 promise to deliver up to 50% higher performance while consuming the same amount of power. However, according to Wittich, the company’s next chips won’t use Arm’s latest and greatest data-center core designs.

Neoverse was something of a stepping stone to something greater, Wittich explained. The company’s next chips will be built on TSMC’s leading-edge 5-nanometer process — the same used in Apple’s blisteringly fast Arm-based Macs — and like Apple, use a completely novel core design.

“The next generation processor is our own Ampere design core,” Wittich said.

He noted that Neoverse wasn't a bad core design. Instead, the company simply needed time to build a core of its own.

“This next-gen part will be significantly more performance than what we have with Altra Max. It's more cores, it’s a new platform. The industry will have moved to DDR5 [memory], PCIe Gen 5.0,” Wittich said.

While details about the new core design are sparse, Wittich did say that Ampere will continue to optimize for cloud-native workloads.

One of Ampere’s biggest departures from conventional data center chips with its first generation of Altra processors was the decision not to use simultaneous multithreading (SMT), a standard feature among the company’s x86 rivals. The technology effectively bifurcates each processor core allowing more of the core to be used at any one point. This is generally more efficient, but doesn’t scale linearly, Wittich explained in an earlier interview.

Since Ampere’s chips have a single thread per core, each core can provide the same level of performance as the last, and this, Wittich said, makes the chips attractive in cloud-native scale-out applications.

“You add 10% more cores, you get 10% more performance,” he said adding that the same can’t be said of Intel or AMD.

And the company’s early customers would seem to prove this out. Since announcing Altra in early 2020, the company has won several high-profile contracts from cloud and hyperscale data center operators. The company expects to see broader adoption with the official launch of its Altra Max processors, which are “sampling right now, and will be in production in Q3,” Wittich said.