The Silver Lining of the Late AMD Opteron A1100 Arrival

AMD announced their ARM server SoC plans at the end of 2012. At the beginning of 2014, AMD was ready "to accelerate the ARM Server Ecosystem with the first ARM-based server SoC" with a development kit. Around March 2014, the A1100 SoCs  started sampling. But the quad core dev kits were not only expensive ($3000!), they also had quite a bit of teething problems as performance did not meet expectations, some of the peripheral hardware did not work properly  and the software ecosystem was far from ready. We were expecting to see Opteron A1100 based servers at the end of 2014, but instead we got more than a year of almost complete silence. Frustratingly long for anyone who was hoping that AMD would finally bring something competitive to the server world.

Today, AMD is finally announcing that their Octal core Opteron A1100 server SoC and platform is fully ready, "a right sized option for the edge of the datacenter". A few smaller partners are even shipping it but there is no sign of tier 1 OEMs yet. Most people following this part of the semiconductor part are thinking "too little, too late". We are pretty sure that includes you, dear reader. But there is more than meets the eye or we would not bother to write this article.