News Arm considers acquisition of Oracle-backed Ampere Computing to expand data center footprint

[Admin]

Ampere, a semiconductor designer leveraging Arm's technology, was valued at $8 billion during a proposed minority investment by Japan’s SoftBank in 2021

Arm considers acquisition of Oracle-backed Ampere Computing to expand data center footprint : Read more

 

[hotaru251]

i do wonder what data center chooses to go arm when EPYC exists?

 

[bit_user]

i do wonder what data center chooses to go arm when EPYC exists?

So far, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all have their own ARM-based server CPUs. All are using off-the-shelf ARM IP, but with specs customized to their needs and just cutting the middle man out of the supply chain. So, there's a definite cost advantage, as well as almost certainly an efficiency advantage from going with ARM.

In buying Ampere newer CPUs, you no longer get ARM's cores and you don't really get a cost advantage. That makes them a harder sell, I think.

Nvidia's Grace CPUs are a slightly different situation, where they're highly-customized for being integrated into the switch fabric with GPUs. So, that eliminates the possibility of them using any off-the-shelf CPU, although they're also using ARM IP for the cores and probably most other key elements.

 

[bit_user]

Ampere’s flagship products, such as the Altra and Altra Max processors, have gained traction among cloud service providers for their performance-per-watt efficiency and ability to handle modern workloads.

This hasn't been true for a while. Ampere Altra launched in 2020, competing against Zen 3-based EPYC and Cascade Lake. Even their move to 128 cores, in 2021, wasn't going to keep Altra relevant for very long.

Altra was superseded by AmpereOne, around the middle of 2024. It followed Altra's approach of being more efficiency-oriented than performance-focused, but I'm not sure it found many takers, due to the biggest cloud providers already having engaged the ARM ecosystem at a deeper level. For those besides the ones I listed, Marvel (which scooped up ARM CPU designer Cavium) or Broadcom will cook them up a custom ARM-based cloud CPU, made to order.

If ARM buys Ampere, it'd be discarding Ampere's main differentiator, which is its custom core design team. That said, if Qualcomm makes another attempt to get back into the server CPU business, or if AMD does the same, there could still be some diversity of options to those in market for anything other than ARM's own IP.

Given Arm’s neutral position as a licensor of its chip designs to a broad range of customers, acquiring Ampere could create potential conflicts of interest with other companies in the Arm ecosystem that compete in the server market.

This isn't even the main conflict of interest. IMO, ARM should be made to spin out its ISA licensing & support business, to avoid being in competition with their ISA customers.

As far as ARM building entire server CPUs, that would (temporarily, at least) cease to be a problem, since the only company building ARM ISA server CPUs and selling them on the open market is Ampere.