Chipmaker Ampere moved to take on Intel and AMD, unveiling a new data center chip alongside a partnership with Oracle, which has announced plans to leverage the company's CPUs in its Gen 2 Cloud.

Ampere Altra is based on the Arm Neoverse N1 architecture and produced using TSMC's 7-nanometer process. The chip is available in SKUs up to 80 cores and offering clock speeds peaking at 3 GHz. It can be had in single and dual-socket configurations, the latter of which supporting 8 terabytes of memory.

"Ampere is solely focused on building the next-generation processors for cloud and edge," said Jeff Wittich, SVP of Products at Ampere, in an interview with SDxCentral.

And Oracle will be one of the first to put the new processor into use.

The decision should, however, come as no surprise given Oracle's investments in Ampere. According to a CNBC report from September, Oracle holds a $40 million stake in the company.

In a statement, Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, expressed his excitement to begin leveraging the new chips. "Oracle is in the final phases of developing Ampere Altra-based platforms and we are excited to validate the performance, power, and scalability benefits that Ampere Altra was designed to meet," he said.

Wittich said Altra was born from a recognition that cloud-native applications, containers, and microservices required a new way of thinking about compute.

"Big growth in edge data center and as compute becomes more distributed that means you need more power efficiency in order to scale out those locations, but also more density on the hyperscale side to get the most out of your deployed capacity," he said, adding that this trend is only going to continue as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to see adoption.

Wittich says the timing is right for a chip like Ampere Altra. He explained that where an Arm-based chip might have struggled to find a place in the data center a few years ago, cloud providers now are looking to diversify their infrastructure by investing in GPUs for AI, smartNICs for network acceleration, and non-x86 CPUs for compute.

"There is a real need for clouds built from real cloud compute," said Wittich, arguing that chips from AMD and Intel are compromised by their enterprise roots and need to support legacy technologies.

SPECrate 2017 benchmarks provided by Ampere showed the Altra processor not only outperforms AMD and Intel's high-end EPYC and Xeon chips, but does so while consuming less power. According to Wittich, the benchmarks showed Altra offers twice the performance and power efficiency of Intel's 28-core Xeon 8280 chipset.

However, one area where Ampere diverges from the competition is its decision to implement a single thread per core. The company claims this benefits both security and user experience since it eliminates the possibility of resource contention when two clients attempt to use threads on the same core simultaneously.

While performance is key to Ampere's goal, so is power efficiency, which has become increasingly important for public cloud providers as they attempt to limit their carbon footprints. Wittich said purpose-built cloud chips, like Altra, serve to help cloud providers meet climate goals as these data centers become a larger fraction of the worldwide power consumption.

Ampere is sampling both single and dual-socket platforms as of today.