64-Bit ARM Server Development Kit from AMD

A great deal of attention at this January’s OCP Summit was focused upon ARM’s SBSA Server platform standardization announcement.  The importance of the SBSA to the ecosystem and our ARM partners cannot be overstated and our efforts in that regard were well received by the OCP community.   Within the ARM partnership, work on the SBSA initiative continues with updates and new specs due to rollout throughout 2014.  That said, I wanted to make note of another key announcement in support of the ARM server ecosystem that occurred during the OCP Summit.

Here’s the link to the AMD press release:

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-accelerate-2014jan28.aspx

While AMD has been talking for some time about its plans for an ARM 64-bit server SOC, “Seattle”, the importance and forethought shown here towards providing a 64-bit Server Dev Kit for the ARM ecosystem must not be overlooked.

From the AMD press release:
The AMD Opteron A-Series development kit is packaged in a Micro-ATX form factor and includes:

• An AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor
• 4 Registered DIMM slots for up to 128GB of DDR3 DRAM 
• PCI Express® connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports
• 8 Serial-ATA connectors 
• Compatibility with standard power supplies
• Ability to be used stand-alone or mounted in standard rack-mount chassis
• Standard UEFI boot environment 
• Linux environment based on Fedora, which provides developers with a rich set of tools and applications
  • Standard Linux GNU tool chain, including cross-development version
  • Platform device drivers 
  • Apache web server, MySQL database engine, and PHP scripting language for developing robust web serving applications
  • Java 7 and Java 8 versions to provide developers to work in a 64-bit ARM environment

ARM is excited about ecosystem momentum continuing to build and we expect that this Dev Kit from AMD will energize and enable our software ecosystem partners, system integrators, and OEM’s to further to optimize their solutions for 64-bit ARM-based Servers.

For our partners and those in the industry focused on the potential of ARM in the data center, I encourage you to check out the http://www.amd.com/arm site which covers AMD’s vision for ARM servers and sign up to stay informed about availability of the above mentioned Dev Kit, which, if SOC’s samples are imminent, should be available in the next couple months.