Ampere has quietly launched the Altra developer kit aimed at software creators in the cloud data center. Ampere offers development kits with up to 80 cores of its system-on-chip, as well as pre-built workstations running a 128-core SoC. Joe Speed, the company’s edge computing chief. An unexpected twist is that the workstation can run Windows and supports drivers for his GeForce RTX graphics card from Nvidia.
of Ampere Altra Developer Platform (AADP) is a prototyping system for common embedded applications, but it can obviously be used to build software for the cloud. The machine can use a variety of add-in boards, including Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards. A little surprising is that it can run Windows. This makes it arguably the most powerful Arm-based machine running a consumer-grade Microsoft operating system.
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Given AADP’s Windows support, nothing stops software makers from trying to port their performance applications to high-performance multi-core Arm hardware to see what kind of performance they can squeeze out of Ampere’s SoCs. is not.
AADP is in amperes altra dev kitIt includes a COM-HPC module with Arm Neoverse N1 based architecture. The module has a 32/64/80 Arm v8.2 64-bit core operating at frequencies up to 1.70 GHz, 2.20 GHz and 2.60 GHz. This motherboard supports up to 768 GB of DR4 memory and fully utilizes the I/O capabilities of Ampere’s 128-core SoC. This SoC offers three x16 and two x4 PCIe slots, as well as two M.2 slots for SSDs.
When it comes to supporting Nvidia’s GeForce RTX consumer graphics cards, Ampere’s SoCs are primarily aimed at cloud and edge computing applications, while Nvidia’s GeForce RTX is primarily designed for gamers and content creators. This is unexpected since (when used with the Studio driver) Still, after all, Ampere and his Nvidia work together across data centers, Especially some of the game data centers (opens in new tab).
Anyway, for now Ampere’s AADP workstation can be ordered starting at $3,250 for the 32-core version with 32GB of DDR4 and $5,658 for the 128-core version with 128GB of memory. Meanwhile, the dev kit itself starts at $2,003.
