Ampere And Inspur Contribute Single- And Dual-Socket Server Motherboard Specifications To The OCP Foundation

AI Ampere And Inspur Contribute Single- And Dual-Socket Server Motherboard Specifications To The OCP Foundation Steven Leibson Contributor Tirias Research Contributor Group Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Oct 26, 2022, 06:30am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images Getty Images The Open Compute Project Foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary at this month’s 2022 OCP Global Summit, held in San Jose, California. The Open Compute Project (OCP) itself started at Facebook in 2009, with the goal of developing architectures for the world’s most energy-efficient data centers.

So far, the industry hasn’t done as badly as many people think based on accounts in the popular press. In an article titled “Recalibrating global data center energy – use estimates” published in Science magazine on February 28, 2020, the article’s multiple authors wrote “…the energy intensity of global data centers has decreased by 20% annually since 2010. ” Later in the article, they wrote “…since 2010, electricity consumption per computation of a typical volume server—the workhorse of the data center—has dropped by a factor of four.

” So data center efficiency has climbed but many more data centers have been built, resulting in a net increase in energy use, but a far greater increase in computing capacity. The OCP Foundation is dedicated to continuing this efficiency improvement in data centers through open-source design and open collaboration. This year, the foundation adopted sustainability as its fifth tenet.

The foundation’s five tenets now include: Efficiency Impact Openness Scalability Sustainability To that end, the OCP Foundation developed a structure for sharing intellectual property with others and, by doing so, encouraging the IT industry to evolve in line with the foundation’s tenets. One IT industry leader that has been participating in this program is Ampere Computing. As it did last year with its Mt.

Jade server motherboard hardware specification, Ampere, along with its design partner Inspur, has contributed their latest specification, a two-socket Mt. Mitchell server motherboard hardware specification , which improves on the previous Mt. Jade specification.

Ampere’s motherboard specifications are based on Ampere CPUs, which are many-core devices. Currently available Ampere CPUs include the Ampere Altra Max, which incorporates as many as 128 processor cores running as fast as 3 GHz, and the Ampere Altra, which incorporates as many as 80 processor cores running as fast as 3. 3 GHz.

Both Ampere CPUs employ Arm v8. 2 cores. The Mt.

Mitchell hardware specification describes single- and dual-socket server motherboards. The two CPUs in the two-socket design communicate over multiple CCIX (Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators) channels. The two-socket motherboard design incorporates either 24 or 36 DIMM sockets and the one-socket design incorporates 24 DIMM sockets.

Both boards support DDR5 RDIMMs with ECC. Both boards support multiple storage devices including NVMe M. 2 cards and U.

2 drives, 2. 5-inch Gen 5 E3. S SSDs, Gen5 E.

1S SSDs, and 3. 5-inch SAS and SATA drives. The M.

2 cards can serve as boot drives. PCIe Gen5 expansion is through MCIO ports and card risers. MORE FOR YOU Livestream Shopping Stays Hot As Whatnot Valuation More Than Doubles To $3.

7 Billion The Power Of DAOs 5 Predictions For B2B CMOs To Win In 2023 Ampere’s calls its CPUs “Cloud Native processors,” which the company believes are better suited to today’s data center needs. Specifically, Ampere CPUs are single-threaded devices. The company’s designs emphasize large numbers of single-threaded cores with large on-chip caches for each core.

These simpler processors draw less power. The alternative, symmetric multithreading (SMT) appeared on mainframes in the 1960s, when computers had only one CPU. The first microprocessor to bring SMT to the mass market appeared in the first year of this century.

That microprocessor was designed for PCs and still had only a single core. With the advent of multi- and many-core CPU designs, Ampere believes that SMT has run its course. The company cites two major reasons for this position: Depending on how it’s written, one thread running in a multi-threaded processor can hog all of the processor’s resources, causing the other thread to starve intermittently.

Having multiple threads run on one processor core with shared resources including execution pipelines and caches is inherently less secure than isolating each software thread to its own processor. Finally, Ampere has joined the OCP Foundation’s modular DC-MHS (Datacenter-ready Modular Hardware System) development effort along with multiple other vendors including AMD, Dell, Intel, Google, HP, Meta, and Microsoft. The foundation’s DC-MHS effort is designed to allow easy component reuse in servers, encourage a circular supply chain, and help system vendors bring new and improved server designs to market faster.

The industry is already adopting DC-MHS for the design of edge, enterprise, and cloud servers. Ampere plans to submit a new server motherboard specification based on DC-MHS to the OCP Foundation next year. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

Check out my website or some of my other work here . Tirias Research tracks and consults for companies throughout the electronics ecosystem from semiconductors to systems and sensors to the cloud. Members of the Tirias Research team have consulted for Ampere Computing and other companies throughout the semiconductor ecosystem.

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