Written by Stephen Nellis and Max A. Charney
(Reuters) – Ampere Computing said on Thursday it will combine its chips with Qualcomm's chips in a new product aimed at lowering power bills through the operation of artificial intelligence chips.
Ampere, founded by former Intel president Renee James, uses Arm Holdings' technology to make central processing chips used by companies such as Oracle and Alphabet's Google. The startup is focused on making chips that are more energy efficient than industry leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Qualcomm, which dominates the mobile phone chip market, has been working to enter the data center AI chip market since 2019 with its own highly power-efficient products. Ampere and Qualcomm announced Thursday that they have combined their chips into a single data center server.
Jeff Wittich, Ampere's chief product officer, said, “Treat this…as the first of many things we're working on.”
“Given that we are tackling similar types of problems, it is clear that we can do much more in the future than building server-level solutions.”
Ampere and Qualcomm's joint product is not in direct competition with AI chip leader Nvidia. Nvidia's chips are used to train AI systems on vast amounts of data.
The Ampere-Qualcomm server is intended to efficiently run these models after training.
Both Ampere and Qualcomm compete indirectly with Nvidia because AI chips are often sold in systems that combine multiple types of chips. Jim McGregor, founder of Tirias Research, said the two could work together to deter potential rivals from gaining access to customers.
“It's important for both companies to keep competitors out of their data centers,” McGregor said.
Ampere also announced Thursday its next-generation central processing unit, which will feature 256 processing cores, up from 192 on the current chip. The new chips, scheduled for release next year, are made using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's 3-nanometer manufacturing process. Ampere said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Max Charney in San Francisco; Editing by Tom Hogue)
