Amazon Announces Availability of ARM-based Home Network and Storage Platform-on-Chip
Annapurna Labs, an Israeli company acquired by Amazon last year, today announced the Alpine platform-on-chip and subsystems product line designed to power digital services for home gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. With a wide portfolio of platforms using 32-bit ARMv7 or 64-bit ARMv8 architectures and peripherals, Alpine provides performance for UHD video streaming, secure storage, application virtualization, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud applications. Several Alpine-based products are already available, and today Annapurna is making Alpine available to other OEMs and service providers.
Alpine chips provides up to four cores of high performance general–purpose compute, advanced storage interfaces, PCIe Gen3, and multimode Ethernet connectivity of up to 10G. With performance and features like DDR4 and 2MB of L2 cache, Alpine enables service providers and OEMs to roll out new consumer services.
Annapurna maintains Alpine support in the Linux and FreeBSD open source projects. These standard open source operating systems allow third parties to run their applications and drivers on the Alpine platform and qualify updated software on Alpine-based products.
The Alpine platform works with a variety of standard open source libraries and development models including Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenWRT, and open source hypervisor and container frameworks.
Home gateway, Wi-Fi router, and NAS product designs based on Alpine are currently available from multiple original device manufacturers (ODMs). In addition, Annapurna offers a hardware development kit (HDK) for Alpine-based designs.
The Alpine platform is designed to bring reliability to the home by integrating thermal sensors, and parity/error correcting code (ECC) on internal buses, external buses, and memory. Further, Alpine provides power savings with configurable core power states, PCIe power states for on-chip components, and support for multiple wake up methods including Wake on LAN (WoL), wake on event, and wake on interrupt.
It's unclear whether Amazon plans to use Annapurna's technology for internal use.