ARM datacentre processor from AMD

ARM processor

AMD calls the chip Hierofalcon and it will have four to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores running at up to 2GHz with TDP of 15W to 30W.

“Sometimes there’s a misconception that ARM means very low power and very low performance,” says Kamal Khouri, director of product management for AMD’s embedded division, ” but this is truly a high performance SOC taking advantage of ARM’s first 64-bit architecture.”

AMD will make the chip on a 28nm process.

Hierofalcon is primarily targeted at servers but AMD sees further application areas in military, aerospace and storage applications – “anywhere where high compute is required,” says Khouri.

As well as CPU cores, Hierofalcon also has 10Gbit Ethernet and PCI Express 3 on-board.

“Hierofalcon was architected with the data centre in mind,” explains Arun Iyengar, corporate v-p and general manager of AMD’s embedded group, “we have a server business unit for the data centre and we want to go after the storage element and the networking element.”

“We’ve been doing 64-bit for a decade,” adds Iyengar,” and the big value we are bringing to ARM is that we can do 64-bit very efficiently.”

As well as Hierofalcon, AMD is bringing out three x86-based 64-bit processors for the embedded market called Bald Eagle, Steppe Eagle and Adelaar.

Bald Eagle – for digital signage and gaming – uses up to four Steamroller cores; Steppe Eagle is the low power offering using the Jaguar core; Adelaar is for graphics.