Ex-Intel president takes on server market with 125W ARM-based Ampere CPUs

Back in 2015, we wrote that Renée James stepped down as President of Intel to pursue an external CEO role. Now she's back in the news and it seems she's gunning to make a dent in the server chip dominance of her former employer.

James is the CEO of Ampere, a startup that joins the race to make ARM a formidable force in the server market. So far these attempts have failed, but perhaps Ampere will have better luck.

The company was founded roughly a year ago and has between 300 to 400 employees. Without mentioning specifics, James claims Ampere is "significantly well capitalized" and has support from The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.

TechCrunch reports the first chip from Ampere will be a custom ARMv8-A 64-bit server model. It runs at 3.3GHz, has support or up to 1TB of memory, 42 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and a 125W TDP. No pricing is mentioned but James promises her chips will offer an "unsurpassed price/performance" ratio.

As for what motivated her to start a new company, she saw an opportunity to do something that had not had been done and she decided to pursue the challenge. “You’re only done until the next great thing is done, then you’re not done anymore,” she said.

The opportunity James saw was workloads moving to the cloud that required a new generation of chip technology that was more efficient than those that had been created in the past. Specifically, she wanted to build a high-density chip from the ground up that was extremely power/performance efficient at a lower cost.

However, the chips from Ampere aren't as new as they seem. As EE Times points out, they're based on the X-Gene 3 design from Applied Micro Circuits Corp that was pitched back in 2015.

AMCC’s X-Gene 3, however, never got into production. AMCC, suffering from losses on its previous generation server SoCs and ballooning development cost for X-Gene 3, sold out to Macom in late 2016. Macom, however, from the get-go, focused its interest in the communications part of AMCC, not its X-Gene ARM server business. The X-Gene enterprise ended up getting shopped around, eventually being acquired by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.

Meanwhile, after leaving Intel in the summer of 2015, James joined Carlyle in early 2016 as an operating executive. The Carlyle Group rebranded the X-Gene ARM server SoC business as Ampere. James became CEO last fall.