AMD has finally and officially announced the sampling of its ARM-based 64-bit server CPUs, the AMD Opteron A1100 series, codename Seattle. Based on four or eight A57 ARM cores with ARMv8 64-bit instruction set, the new ARM-based server CPUs will be available in two versions, the AMD Opteron A1110 series and as the AMD Opteron A-Series development platform in micro-ATX form factor.

In addition to 4 or 8 ARM Cortex-A57 cores, the AMD Opteron A1100 series also features up to 4MB or 8MB of shared L3 cache, configurable dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory with ECC, up to four SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMMs, 8 lanes of PCI-Express gen 3 I/O, eight SATA3 ports, two 10Gbit Ethernet ports, ARM TrustZone technology and Crypto and data compression co-processors.

The AMD Opteron A-Series development kit is packed in a micro-ATX form factor and includes an AMD Opteron A1100 series processor with four registered DIMM slots for up to 128 GB of DDR3 DRAM, PCI-Express connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports, eight SATA connectors and will be compatible with standard PSUs as well as have an ability to be used stand-alone or mounted in standard rack chassis. It also features standard UEFI boot environment and Linux environment based on Fedora.

"The needs of the data center are changing. A one-size-fits-all approach typically limits efficiency and results in higher-cost solutions," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the AMD server business unit. "The new ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor brings the experience and technology portfolio of an established server processor vendor to the ARM ecosystem and provides the ideal complement to our established AMD Opteron x86 server processors."

Source: AMD.com.