AMD unveils its first ARM processor, the Opteron A1100

A new player has officially entered the ARM CPU market – AMD. Opteron A1100 packs four or eight Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2+ GHz. As you can imagine (if the Opteron name didn’t give it away), this will be a server part.

This chip is aimed at high-density servers where it’s more important to run many threads than run one thread quickly. AMD will be offering a developer kit with a Fedora-based Linux OS and a set of developer tools (Apache, MySQL, PHP). The kit includes a micro-ATX motherboard.
The A1100 packs 4MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache and supports up to 128GB of DDR3 and DDR4 dual-channel RAM. For expansion and connectivity there’s PCIe 3, SATA 3 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet support. The chip is well outside the cooling and battery capacity capabilities of mobile devices with a 25W TDP, so there’s no hope of ever seeing the Opteron A1100 (or a similar chip) in anything smaller than a laptop.
NVIDIA has found some success with its Tegra chipsets in the mobile segment, but is it enough for AMD to follow? If only the company hadn’t sold its Adreno GPU division to Qualcomm, it would have been all set.