Renee James is the founder and CEO of Ampere Computing. In this interview, she shares her motivations behind starting a new semiconductor company, and how the new Altra processor was designed for cloud software.

Learn more about our Altra and Altra Max processors at www.amperecomputing.com.

#16: Building Cloud Native CPUs (Renee James)

Hear Ampere executives and cloud providers discuss the future of cloud computing with Ampere® Altra and Altra Max, and exciting new developments on our product roadmap. 
 
Renee James, Founder and CEO 
Atiq Bajwa, Chief Technology Officer
Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer
 
Learn more about Ampere at 
https://www.amperecomputing.com

#17: Ampere Strategy and 2021 Roadmap Update

Richard Shannon is a Distinguished Engineer in the architecture team at Ampere Computing, working on SoC and interconnects. We sat down and talked about the kinds of problems cloud service providers are looking to solve and how Ampere addresses that market. We also chat about what an SoC architect actually does and how we mentor the next generation of CPU architects.

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com/

#18: Breaking Away From Legacy Architectures (Richard Shannon)

Matt Erler is a Principal Engineer in the architecture team at Ampere Computing, working on SoCs and coherency protocols. We chatted about how we choose whether to build our own IP or license externally, competitive benchmarking, how our team flourishes from the creation of a psychologically safe working environment, and how we welcome a diverse crew of engineers through small things like writing inclusive technical documentation and a collaborative culture. 

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com/

#19: Building Blocks of an SoC (Matt Erler)

Naren Nayak is the Director of Application Engineering in the product solutions team at Ampere Computing, working on enabling customers to get the most out of Ampere Altra and Altra Max SoCs. He shared insights on what cloud service providers are looking for in their hyperscale installations, and the techniques Ampere uses to ensure our products meet the stringent demands of cloud software.

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com/

#20: Ensuring Cloud Customer Success with HW/SW Optimizations (Naren Nayak)

Hear Ampere executives and cloud providers discuss the future of cloud computing with the Ampere® Altra® processor family, as well as key customers sharing their enthusiasm for these products.
 
Renee James, Founder and CEO 
Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer
 
Learn more about Ampere at 
https://www.amperecomputing.com

#21: Ampere Strategy and 2022 Roadmap Update

Naren Nayak and Mahesh Madhav discuss the challenges of simultaneous multi-threaded cores and why single-threaded cores deliver predictable performance, better security, and lower TCO for cloud computing.

Short Stacks

#22: Problems with SMT in the Cloud

From the Summer Intern Class of 2022, we bring you the first of a series of episodes where junior engineers chat with their mentors and managers. Here, Justin Newsome (North Carolina State University) invites Arjun Khare to share insights into our internship program, and the philosophies of engineering.  Arjun is a Principal Engineer in the Software and Firmware team in Raleigh, NC.

#23: Building Birdhouses and Building Firmware (Arjun Khare)

Zaid Alali and Darren Hart come into the studio to share what the Open Source Software team is doing at Ampere, plus tips for how to interact with the Linux community.  Zaid is an recent PhD graduate from University of Colorado, and Darren is a Distinguished Engineer in software systems.

#24: Proper Git Etiquette (Darren Hart)

From the Summer Intern Class of 2022, we continue with the series of episodes where junior engineers chat with their mentors. In this installment, Yash Caculo and Mike Julier share stories from their work on CPU architecture and workload characterization, along with tips on when to build tools and how to write clean code. We hear how Mike applies leadership skills learned from his days on the Michigan football team that won a Rose Bowl championship, and discover what goes through his mind when running through the desert.

Yash Caculo is working on his MS at Georgia Tech, and Mike Julier is a Distinguished Engineer in SoC architecture and performance debug.

#25: Learning is the New Literacy (Michael Julier)

From the Summer Intern Class of 2022, we continue with the series of episodes where junior engineers chat with senior leaders. In this installment, Ashley Reid and Sean Varley meet to chat about sustainable computing and the engineering challenges that Ampere overcomes to build low-power processors. Sean also talks about his journey through firmware engineering and CPU architecture into technical product marketing.

Ashley Reid is about to complete her BSEE at Oregon State University, and Sean Varley is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Ampere's headquarters in Santa Clara, CA.

#26: Green Computing for the Cloud (Sean Varley)

From the Summer Intern Class of 2022, we continue with the series of episodes where junior engineers chat with their mentors. This time, Susana Alcorta speaks with Scott Tetrick on their work with applied machine learning and teases out war stories from Scott's time building and debugging SoCs. 

Susana Alcorta is working on her PhD at UT-Austin, and Scott Tetrick is an Ampere Fellow in the Architecture team in Portland, OR.

#27: Unintuitive Architecture (Scott Tetrick)

Another intern has joined us in the studio, continuing the series of episodes where junior engineers chat with senior leaders. In this installment, Tito Reinhard joins us from Portland State University, and speaks with his team leader Pete Baker who is the VP of Customer and Developer Engineering. Topics in this show include sustainable engineering for climate/energy concerns, technical curiosity, and Tito's project involving data warehousing for customer performance benchmarking.

Applicable buzzwords include: Great Teams, Great Culture, ARM Startup, Developer Outreach, Human Engineering, Retrospective Leadership, Customer Engagement, Customer Success, Developer Advocacy, Ampere Ambassadors, Building teams, Software, Leadership Empathy, Servant Leadership, Performance Benchmarking

#28: Working for Your Team (Pete Baker)

Hear Ampere executives, partners, and end users discuss the future of cloud computing and the importance of high performance, high efficiency compute.

Renee James, Founder and CEO 
Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer
 
Learn more about Ampere at 
https://www.amperecomputing.com

Footnote:

The web services study here is based on performance and power data for many typical workloads using single node performance comparisons measured and published by Ampere Computing.

Details and efficiency footnotes are available at https://www.amperecomputing.com/home/roadmap-footnotes

#29: Ampere Strategy and 2023 Roadmap Update

Listen to our mechanical engineers discuss all aspects of board design at a server startup. Our intern Kate Murray joins us through Oregon State University's MECOP initiative, and speaks with her team leader Josh Levy who is a Principal Engineer in the mechanical design team. Topics in this show include thermal analysis and thermal solutions, vibrational elements of servers, sourcing parts for reference designs, immersion cooling, modal analysis, and the tangible aspects of mechanical design.

#30: Mechanical Design (Josh Levy)

Two software engineers come together to discuss all the aspects of solving problems at the hardware software interface. Our firmware intern Jacob Little joins us from North Carolina State University, and speaks to one of Ampere's technical leaders, Kevin Smith. Kevin is the Vice President of Languages and Compilers. Topics in this episode include working across organizations, how to up-level your communications, explaining concepts to audiences both technical and non-technical, and uplifting our peers!

#31: Solving Puzzles in Compilers and Beyond (Kevin Smith)

Design Verification is a discipline that sits on the boundary between hardware and software -- many of the same engineering skills come into play, but the end goal is to ship a piece of silicon! And the design space keep getting exponentially larger, yet the number of DV engineers is held constant, so what can a CPU designer do? Listen in as Allan Rudwick and Carson Bunker sit down and chat about the methods used to verify Ampere's custom cores and SoC products.

#33: Design Verification as Software Engineering

Ampere’s 2024 Strategy and Roadmap Update.  As a company that specializes in sustainable and power-efficient computing for the cloud and AI, Ampere is proud to highlight our continued innovation and invention in this field including details on upcoming products, milestones, and key industry alliances.

Renee James, Founder and CEO
Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer

To learn more about Ampere visit https://www.amperecomputing.com and for more information on performance claims, see footnotes which are available at:
https://amperecomputing.com/home/roadmap-2024-footnotes

#32: Ampere Strategy and 2024 Roadmap Update

Great engineers have the ability to socialize their ideas, and spar respectfully with their technical colleagues. Listen to Dave and Sumiran focus on this foundational skill and share how we can all improve our communication. Dave Harriman is a Distinguished Engineer and chair of the PCIe protocol working group. Sumiran Shubhi is a Principal Engineer and SoC Architect.

#34: Technical Communication

Atiq Bajwa is the Executive Vice President of Architecture at Ampere Computing.  We sat down with Atiq and learned about the inception of Ampere, and where he sees the semiconductor industry going. 

Learn more about Ampere at http://www.amperecomputing.com/

#1: Starting a Semiconductor Company (Atiq Bajwa)

Mauri Whalen is the Vice President of Software at Ampere Computing. Here we chat with Mauri on how Ampere enables developers on our new eMAG servers, targetting the cloud platform ecosystem.

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com.

#2: Enabling Cloud Software (Mauri Whalen)

How important is it to cultivate great customer relationships? As engineers shift employers, we find ourselves working with former colleagues in fresh roles. Shiv Kaushik is an Ampere Fellow, working at the boundary between Architecture and Software. We sat down with Shiv to learn about the importance of customer relationships, his career path spanning the boundary between hardware and software, and his video gaming habits.

#4: Fostering Trustful Relationships (Shiv Kaushik)

John and Mahesh sit down with Sean Mirkes, the VP of Logic Development. We have a candid discussion on career transitions, and Sean's role in building out a world-class organization on a foundation of personal growth, technical mentorship, and inclusivity of thought.

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com.

#3: Building a World-Class Design Team (Sean Mirkes)

Something special happened this summer at Ampere when our interns came into the studio to interview their mentors! Great conversations ensued as we chatted about our career paths. In the first of this series, Kathy Thompson (Reed College) invites Annie Duong to share her story on getting into engineering. Annie is a Senior Design Manager at Ampere, and she speaks on how to push one another to achieve your best, encouraging psychological safety at work, creating a post-gender culture, and what she thinks about during her long-distance runs.

#5: Including All Voices in the Workplace (Annie Duong)

Jacob Smith is a co-founder of Packet, a cloud service provider delivering access to a variety of hardware solutions to facilitate incremental growth and automation. Packet offers developers a bare-metal experience of cloud technologies and automation, while still maintaining the benefit of fast moving silicon through frequent platform refresh.

Mahesh Madhav is a performance engineer at Ampere Computing, and helps developers connect with hardware to squeeze the most out of their Ampere Altra systems. Ampere's partnership with Packet brings hyperscale technology to non-hyperscalers, and proves opportunity for diverse architectures to thrive.

#8: Deploying Bare Metal Ampere Servers (Jacob Smith)

Something special happened at Ampere when our interns took over the studio to interview their mentors! In this episode, Tony Faubert (UWashington) invites Jon Perry to chat about his origin story into engineering and CPU design. Jon is a Senior Principal Engineer at Ampere, and he speaks on the group dynamics of a small team, building technical culture, and how diversity of thought is beneficial when crafting a new core microarchitecture. Tony shares his experience as an intern in the performance team, and the mind-boggling freedom he was given to explore and contribute to our upcoming processor this past summer.

#6: Engineering a New Microarchitecture (Jon Perry)

Four interns from our 2019 summer class take over the studio and share thoughts on working at Ampere. Thanks go to Kat Thompson (Reed), Anthony Faubert (Washington), Brita Hill (Portland State), and Mayur Parelkar (Carnegie Mellon). Cheers to a great learning experience!

Summer 2022 applications are now online at our careers website. If you join, you can also produce a podcast!

#7: Experiencing Ampere through a Summer Internship

In this episode, Stacey Ross and Kalpana Kothapally share the art and science of design verification, the methodology of finding bugs in hardware designs before tape-out, before silicon. There is a particular mindset that DV engineers must take, to root out problems in designs, and the techniques they use have direct analogies to software quality control. Hear what it takes to become a great DV engineer!

#11: Verifying a CPU Design (Stacey and Kalpana)

Tony D'Anna is the Director of Technical Program Management at Ampere Computing. We sat down with Tony to discuss the design and buildout of motherboards for the Altra product line.

Learn more about Ampere at www.amperecomputing.com/

#13: Designing a Server Motherboard (Tony D'Anna)

Christen turns the mic around and interviews Mahesh, and gets him to open up about his journeys in the technical and creative realms, and how he teases out stories from the employees at Ampere Computing.

#12: Sharing Engineering Stories (Mahesh Madhav)

Stories about cloud computing at the nimble semiconductor startup named Ampere, Hosted by Mahesh Madhav, Christen Cannon, and Travis Lazar.

Popular tracks by Ampere Amplified