Ampere Computing, the startup headed by Intel's former president Renee James, on Tuesday released its first custom designed Arm processors for the data center.

The company said the new chips, which cost $550 to $850, have been selected by Lenovo Group Ltd and several other companies that make servers, which power Internet-based services.

Ampere is taking a different path from both Intel and AMD, as the company's chips are not based on the x86 architecture. Ampere is using the ARM technology and come in 16- and 32-core versions with speeds of up to 3.3 GHz. Integrated mixed signal I/O features include PCIE Gen 3, SATA Gen 3, USB and workload accelerators, as well as a high-performance on-chip fabric.

Enterprise class features of the chip include ECC (error-cor-recting code) and RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability). The chips also support virtualization and have security features integrated.

The chips designed to compete with mid-level traditional server chips. But Ampere's CEO Renee James says that the company put extra care into ensuring the chips run customers' software well as opposed to acing speed tests.

Taiwan Semiconductor Co Ltd is manufacturer of Ampere's chips. This means that Ampere's next generation of chips, due in 2019, will take advantage of TSMC's 7-nanometer manufacturing technology, which is more advanced than Intel's current generation of technology and is being used on Apple's newest iPhones and Qualcomm's latest phone processors.