In a big announcement this morning, Ampere AmpereOne has its first cloud instance at Google. Today, the companies announced that the Google C3A instances are being powered by AmpereOne chips a big step for both companies.
AmpereOne Lands First in Google Cloud C3A Instances
One of the most notable parts of the announcement is the instance series. These are now C3A compute instances. The initial Ampere instances were T2A Tau instances. The Tau line was an entry into Google Cloud. The compute line is Google Cloud elevating the stature of Ampere CPUs.
The new chips offer more cores, more cache, an update to DDR5 and PCIe Gen5, as well as a number of improvements to things like bfloat16 support and even features like being able to support nested virtualization.
It appears that this feature set, plus what is set to be a significant increase in performance per core, was enough to push Google Cloud to categorize AmpereOne as a compute instance instead of a Tau instance.
Final Words
This is a big deal for Ampere since it is its first major cloud provider to announce instances with AmpereOne. Our sense is that other Ampere Altra customers like OCI and Microsoft Azure will follow at some point just because they will both need next-gen Arm offerings to compete with Google C3A and AWS Graviton CPUs. Google Cloud C3A is in Private Preview and we hope that general availability follows soon.
Although we have seen the chips, and systems like the above from Supermicro and Gigabyte, it is still likely a bit of time until we can get hands-on with AmpereOne. For the past few months, the production capacity has been sold and delivered to major cloud providers, Google Cloud being one of them. Our hope is that we can bring you AmpereOne by later this year. Stay tuned for more on that.
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