Ampere is the great cover of the ARM world. Prepares a CPU with 256 cores and has a big fan: Linus Torvalds

The ARM architecture that has already conquered our phones wants to conquer everything else. This is demonstrated by the Apple Silicon family with the Apple M1 chips and their successors that have been demonstrating their virtues in Macs for years, but things will get especially lively very soon.

The Snapdragon X Elite promise. First, with the imminent arrival of laptops based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon These chips pose a revolution similar to the one that the Apple M1 posed in the Macs in which they initially appeared: fantastic efficiency, remarkable performance and a battery life that leaves x86-64 chips from Intel and AMD behind.

Ampere is coming. And then, with what a California company proposes that is little by little emerging as a promising protagonist in this segment. Is about Ampere Computing, a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Their commitment to ARM architecture is total, and they have just announced a unique milestone.

AmpereOne and its 256 cores. The signature just presented a new version of AmpereOne that will have 256 cores. They already have a processor from this family with 192 cores, but the new iteration, which will take advantage of 3 nm photolithography, will go even further and boast something increasingly important: efficiency.

Data centers are getting out of hand. Those responsible for Ampere explain how the energy needs of data centers are skyrocketing due to AI. In 2022 the estimated consumption was 460 TWh, but by 2026 expected that this consumption exceeds 1,000 Twh. The new Ampere chip will allow us to propose efficiency improvements that precisely mitigate this problem.

“40% more powerful than any CPU on the market”. The company assures that this future CPU that will arrive in 2025 will offer 40% more power than any other CPU on the market. The reason, that enormous number of cores, which probably allow enviable multicore performance that will be fantastic for applications with great needs in the field of concurrency.

Qualcomm as an ally. The firm has partnered with Qualcomm to develop joint AI inference solutions. The result is systems Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 aimed at the cloud and processing AI requests.

Llama 3 consumes a third thanks to Ampere. According to Ampere officials, the Llama 3 AI model is already running on Ampere CPUs in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. It does so on 128-core Ampere Altra chips, without GPUs, and with these chips you get the same performance as with NVIDIA A10 GPUs paired with x86 processors (unspecified). The difference: that Ampere chips consume only a third of what their rivals consume.

Linus is a fan of Ampere. A few days ago Linus Torvalds published the Linux 6.9 kernel, and in the release notes he explained that since he has “a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere)” he is now doing “almost as many compilations in arm64 as I have done in x86.” 64″. The firm has given him a workstation of which the details are not known, but which is probably one of the family Ampere Altra Developer Platform.

Linux, increasingly ARM. The operating system created by Torvalds is famous for supporting a wide variety of architectures, although x86-64 machines with chips from Intel and AMD have always been the protagonists. For some time now, however, Linus has been using a MacBook M2 (a chip with ARM architecture) to compile the kernels and then publish them. This, without a doubt, is encouraged.

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