Technology startup Ampere launched a new class of microprocessor for data centers Thursday, aiming to win a piece of that increasingly competitive market with chips designed to draw less electricity.
“We’re changing the paradigm around performance and power,” said Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, which has engineering offices in Portland’s Pearl District.
The data center industry is growing rapidly and faces new demands from emerging artificial intelligence services, which requires enormously powerful computers to simulate human responses. That’s straining regional energy grids and boosting overall power consumption amid growing concern about how electricity generation contributes to global warming.
Ampere hopes that gives it an opening in an industry once dominated by Intel. Ampere, which formerly based its processors on designs licensed from ARM Holdings, says it crafted its own processors to make them more energy efficient.
The computers that store and retrieve files and process user requests at data centers are so energy intensive that operators rate their capacity in megawatts. Ampere hopes its chips will help usher in a future where that metric becomes secondary when evaluating data center capacity.
“We cannot continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center,” Ampere CEO Renée James said in Tuesday’s announcement.
The new chips, which the company calls AmpereOne, have 192 computing cores. Ampere says that’s double the number of cores in rival products from AMD, and triple what Intel offers in its Sapphire Rapids chips.
Ampere says its custom design enables higher performance without a corresponding increase in electricity use.
Ampere’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California, down the road from Intel’s corporate offices. Like Intel, however, the heart of Ampere’s engineering is in Oregon.
James, Intel’s former president, lives in Portland. Chief Technology Officer Atiq Bajwa and Chief Engineering Officer Rohit Vidwans, also Intel alumni, led development of the AmpereOne chip from Ampere’s Pearl District offices.
It’s rare for big, new players to emerge in the semiconductor industry. The high cost of engineering new microprocessors and manufacturing them serves as a barrier to new entrants.
Founded in 2017, Ampere saw an opening as Intel stumbled with successive generations of new chip technologies. Intel’s lapses also allowed contract manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes Ampere’s chips on its 5-nanometer production technology, has captured the technological lead.
Ampere faces a long road, regardless, competing against companies many times its size. Ampere has fewer than 2,000 employees, compared to the 131,000 Intel employed at the end of last year. (Ampere won’t say how many it employs in Portland, but it appears to be a large share of its engineering team.)
Regulatory filings show that tech giant Oracle has invested $850 million into Ampere over the past six years. And with the data center industry rapidly expanding, Ampere could build a large business if it can capture even a small share of that market.
— Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | 503-294-7699
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