Ampere Throws the Sustainable Gauntlet
Ampere Computing gathered data center leaders in the bay this morning to throw a gauntlet at the future of cloud computing and its strategic role in our collective sustainable future. Ampere’s CEO Renee James introduced the discussion as an “old-fashioned industry convening” on the challenge of continuing to scale performance and capacity of compute capability within a finite power and sustainability footprint. James pointed out that the industry has relied on scaling power to address requirements for more performance with data centers contributing approximately 3% of global CO2 emissions. With energy costs and therefore cost per compute rising rapidly and becoming an increasing impedance to achieving scale, James’ goal with Ampere is to deliver compute performance below the efficiency frontier. She’s embracing the technology innovation that the semiconductor industry has been known for for decades in a different fundamental direction.
James was joined by an all-star cast led by Oracle Chair Larry Ellison who discussed how his OCI innovation is investing across Nvidia, AMD and Ampere to deliver compute performance to fuel AI era compute requirements. Oracle announced earlier in the day support of Ampere instances on OCI cloud for the Oracle database as well as delivery of support for on-prem deployments. This signals a huge win for Ampere and Arm architecture for a foundational enterprise workload. Ellison stated that they made this move because “x86 architecture is coming to the end of its life.” His vision focuses on new levels of balanced computing with emphasis on increasing performance of data movement to feed CPU and GPU resources and delivering this within constrained power limits. He went further stating that Ampere allows OCI to double compute within the same power envelope.
James was also joined by Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of HPE Compute. HPE and Ampere shook up compute offerings earlier this year at OCP Summit Prague with a joint announcement of Ampere powered HPE platforms which you can learn about on this TechArena interview. Neil positioned this infrastructure today aimed for enterprises doing full stack cloud native workloads on prem and laid out the market opportunity targeting the >40% of servers which are more than 5 years old that consume 2/3 of the compute power in data centers today. This is an interesting value prop to contemplate. I don’t see the n set between antique server infrastructure and full stack cloud native design being remotely close to 100%, but there’s no argument that the enterprise is indeed embracing cloud native designs and maintaining some of these workloads within their own infrastructure. It’s not surprising that HPE is delighted to have an architectural choice to discuss in their offerings, and time will tell if this is an industry and investor message from HPE leaders or a bona fide market move from the company.
The folks at Ampere also made a terrific decision to include Andrew Isaacs, professor of climate change and tech, from UC Berkeley, in the discussion. Followers of the TechArena will know that we’re extremely bullish on tech and specifically data center compute’s strategic role in helping to address climate change as most recently discussed in our interview with Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe. Andrew’s view was similar to Jonathan and Ian’s – corporate action is necessary to change our climate trajectory, and computing’s imperative to change.
My thoughts on what was laid out today? I’m delighted to see Renee and her team focus the industry on the opportunity for efficiency vector innovation, and with friends like Oracle and HPE, Ampere will gain attention from both customers and competitors. It’s the kind of industry leadership I expect from a protégé of Andy Grove, and Renee didn’t disappoint today. We’ve already seen this leadership have impact with AMD’s recent introduction of high core count EPYC processors to thwart Ampere core leadership, and I expect Intel to follow suit in due time. I also expect other cloud providers who have already embraced Ampere instances to follow Oracle’s lead and grow offerings for Ampere powered cloud native offerings. I even can buy leading enterprises dipping into Ampere powered deployments.
Ultimately, I don’t know if I completely buy Ellison’s statement that x86 is at the end nor do I want to crown Arm the fait a’ complit champion for the future quite yet. I think the future is much more complex with CPU, GPU, other accelerators and open frameworks for chiplet designs defining the compute foundation that best serves customer requirements. What this move from Ampere represents is an accelerant of open market innovation where broad industry focus will improve both compute efficiency and choice of customer offerings. And with that, customers, and all of us, ultimately win. As always, thanks for reading - Allyson
Ampere Computing gathered data center leaders in the bay this morning to throw a gauntlet at the future of cloud computing and its strategic role in our collective sustainable future. Ampere’s CEO Renee James introduced the discussion as an “old-fashioned industry convening” on the challenge of continuing to scale performance and capacity of compute capability within a finite power and sustainability footprint. James pointed out that the industry has relied on scaling power to address requirements for more performance with data centers contributing approximately 3% of global CO2 emissions. With energy costs and therefore cost per compute rising rapidly and becoming an increasing impedance to achieving scale, James’ goal with Ampere is to deliver compute performance below the efficiency frontier. She’s embracing the technology innovation that the semiconductor industry has been known for for decades in a different fundamental direction.
James was joined by an all-star cast led by Oracle Chair Larry Ellison who discussed how his OCI innovation is investing across Nvidia, AMD and Ampere to deliver compute performance to fuel AI era compute requirements. Oracle announced earlier in the day support of Ampere instances on OCI cloud for the Oracle database as well as delivery of support for on-prem deployments. This signals a huge win for Ampere and Arm architecture for a foundational enterprise workload. Ellison stated that they made this move because “x86 architecture is coming to the end of its life.” His vision focuses on new levels of balanced computing with emphasis on increasing performance of data movement to feed CPU and GPU resources and delivering this within constrained power limits. He went further stating that Ampere allows OCI to double compute within the same power envelope.
James was also joined by Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of HPE Compute. HPE and Ampere shook up compute offerings earlier this year at OCP Summit Prague with a joint announcement of Ampere powered HPE platforms which you can learn about on this TechArena interview. Neil positioned this infrastructure today aimed for enterprises doing full stack cloud native workloads on prem and laid out the market opportunity targeting the >40% of servers which are more than 5 years old that consume 2/3 of the compute power in data centers today. This is an interesting value prop to contemplate. I don’t see the n set between antique server infrastructure and full stack cloud native design being remotely close to 100%, but there’s no argument that the enterprise is indeed embracing cloud native designs and maintaining some of these workloads within their own infrastructure. It’s not surprising that HPE is delighted to have an architectural choice to discuss in their offerings, and time will tell if this is an industry and investor message from HPE leaders or a bona fide market move from the company.
The folks at Ampere also made a terrific decision to include Andrew Isaacs, professor of climate change and tech, from UC Berkeley, in the discussion. Followers of the TechArena will know that we’re extremely bullish on tech and specifically data center compute’s strategic role in helping to address climate change as most recently discussed in our interview with Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe. Andrew’s view was similar to Jonathan and Ian’s – corporate action is necessary to change our climate trajectory, and computing’s imperative to change.
My thoughts on what was laid out today? I’m delighted to see Renee and her team focus the industry on the opportunity for efficiency vector innovation, and with friends like Oracle and HPE, Ampere will gain attention from both customers and competitors. It’s the kind of industry leadership I expect from a protégé of Andy Grove, and Renee didn’t disappoint today. We’ve already seen this leadership have impact with AMD’s recent introduction of high core count EPYC processors to thwart Ampere core leadership, and I expect Intel to follow suit in due time. I also expect other cloud providers who have already embraced Ampere instances to follow Oracle’s lead and grow offerings for Ampere powered cloud native offerings. I even can buy leading enterprises dipping into Ampere powered deployments.
Ultimately, I don’t know if I completely buy Ellison’s statement that x86 is at the end nor do I want to crown Arm the fait a’ complit champion for the future quite yet. I think the future is much more complex with CPU, GPU, other accelerators and open frameworks for chiplet designs defining the compute foundation that best serves customer requirements. What this move from Ampere represents is an accelerant of open market innovation where broad industry focus will improve both compute efficiency and choice of customer offerings. And with that, customers, and all of us, ultimately win. As always, thanks for reading - Allyson
