AMD's 'Seattle' processors, which the company first announced way back in 2013, have finally started shipping and will soon be available as a low-power ARM SoC option for high-density servers.
The Opteron A1100 series includes three 64-bit ARM SoCs, all of which sport features such as dual-channel DDR4 memory support, eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, 14 SATA ports, and two 10 GbE ports. The SoCs include either four or eight ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked up to 2.0 GHz, as well as a secondary Cortex-A5 for accelerated encryption, compression and other system functions.
The models are split into an eight-core 2.0 GHz part, an eight-core 1.7 GHz part, and a four-core 1.7 GHz part. The eight-core SoCs feature a TDP of 32W and 4 MB of L2 cache, while the four core model is rated at 25W and packs 2 MB of cache.
AMD says their Seattle SoCs will cost up to $150, which makes them cheaper than Intel's widely-used Xeon D server processors. Unfortunately, AMD also says that Xeon Ds are significantly faster than their Seattle chips, although the company hasn't revealed any specific performance details at this stage.
Instead, AMD says that Seattle's performance will be around that of the Atom-based C2000 series, which became available in 2013. Considering Seattle was originally supposed to launch in late 2014, it's not surprising to see its performance match older chips rather than what Intel has on the market today.
It'll be interesting to see whether Seattle will sell in any significant quantities considering it now seems a tad outdated. AMD does have more ARM chips in the pipeline, some of which will be available for servers, which will hopefully be more competitive and launch in a more timely fashion.
https://www.techspot.com/news/63485-amd-finally-launches-their-arm-based-seattle-server.html
