Former Intel Corp. President Renee James is challenging her old company’s long-held leadership position in the data center.

Her startup, Ampere Computing Inc., today launched two server processors that the company promises will one-up Intel in the efficiency department. The chips ship under the brand eMag and are based on designs from ARM Holdings, whose technology forms the basis of the silicon in most of the world’s handsets and countless smaller devices.

James (pictured) shared some impressive data about the chips in an interview with VentureBeat. She said an eMag processor demonstrated about twice the performance of a comparably priced Intel Xeon Gold 6130 in a test based on SPECint, a popular chip benchmark. Ampere’s silicon seems to compare even more favorably against Intel’s Xeon D series, with James saying that it provides three times higher performance per dollar.

The exact price depends on the model. The more affordable of Ampere’s two chips offers 16 cores and will sell for $550, while the beefier 32-core version is hitting the market at $850. Both have a maximum clock speed of 3.3 gigahertz with the ability to accommodate up to 1 terabyte of external DRAM memory.

The chips are based on a 16-nanometer architecture, meaning they’re a few steps behind the denser, seven-nanometer processors that have recently started hitting the market. One drawback of Ampere’s silicon is that it only allows for a single central processing unit per server.

The startup said it plans to introduce an improved, seven-nanometer iteration next year that will support more powerful machines. Moreover, the two chip generations that are set to follow the 2019 model are already in the planning stage.

Ampere isn’t the first chipmaker to have set out to challenge Intel’s industry-leading server chips. Bigger players such as Qualcomm Inc. brought their own ARM processors to market in recent years, but haven’t had much success loosening the chip giant’s market dominance. 

One factor that’s working in Ampere’s factor is Intel’s struggle to mass-produce chips based on its latest 10-nanometer architecture. The company had to push back the launch date multiple times in recent years but recently committed to start shipping next-generation processors by the 2019 holiday season. The first 10-nanometer server chip is on track to follow suit in mid-2020.

Photo: Vodafone Institut/Flickr