4 ms·
A blog post is coming, so I might have jumped the shark here. An interesting note from a Cloudflare engineer: Most powerful Xeon is the 28 core Platinum 2180 a
by Aissen 9y ago
A blog post is coming, so I might have jumped the shark here. An interesting note from a Cloudflare engineer:
Most powerful Xeon is the 28 core Platinum 2180 at $10k RSP and >200W TDP. Due to the nature of Intel turbo boost it almost always operates at TDP under load. Our ARM is the Centriq 2452 at less than $1400 RSP, 46 cores and 120W TDP, that it never hits. Beats Xeon 9/10 workloads.
https://twitter.com/thecomp1ler/status/976617883164921857 https://twitter.com/thecomp1ler/status/976617883164921857
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThis is amazing! We're witnessing the beginning of the demise of Intel in the data canter, right in front of our eyes. I had thought this would take decades... I just hope that thanks to large companies like CloudFlare buying large numbers of ARM servers their prices finally start going down to a reasonable level.
- sigi45 9y agoI don't think so. I'm guessing that the xeons feature set is not used at all and this specific payload is just much better on that arm. There is a big chance, that whatever cloudflare is doing on that machine, is massive parallel and simple.
- Arnt 9y agoThese nine specific payloads, if you take the tweet's words literally.
- thecompilr 9y agoThose are indeed workloads, specific for a webserver and even more specific for CF. Many other workloads that we don't care about that Intel can handily win of course. We don't have use for most Intel extensions, like AVX512 and barely use any AVX2. Intel is the king of HPC and single threaded performance for a few more years. Although ARM can potentially leapfrog Intel in the HPC space, if someone implements the Salable Vector Instruction extension in 1024 or 2048 bit.
- pdpi 9y agoMy understanding is that some large parts of the feature set aren't usable anyhow. E.g. there's enough of a ramp up/ramp down power cost for the vector units that you'd never want to compile your binaries with SSE/AVX turned on unless your workload makes near constant use of those units.
- sigi45 9y agoI have never heard that one before. Do you have any sources for that?
- Jenya_ 9y agohttps://www.quora.com/Why-are-AVX-instructions-so-power-hungry https://www.quora.com/Why-are-AVX-instructions-so-power-hung... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925039
- pdpi 9y agoThanks for the quotes. Apparently I slightly misremembered the problem. From the second one, this is what I was thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13926839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13926839
- znpy 9y ago> I had thought this would take decades... Well it took decades...
- yellowapple 9y ago"I had thought this would take decades.." It is taking decades at this rate. Or at least a decade. Not to long ago when Intel was yanking the rug out from under the SPARC and POWER and MIPS and $RANDOM_PROPRIETARY_MAINFRAME_CISC datacenter marketshares.
- thisisit 9y agoAny ideas on what is the performance Cavium Thunder X2 CPUs?
- jazoom 9y agoFYI: "jump the shark" has a completely different meaning to "jump the gun", which is what you wanted to say.
- ksec 9y agoAt $8K savings per server, that is 8M if you have 1000 server at Cloudflare. Of course you have to invest a lot of people into software and testing as well. As well as many other time consuming things that were likely standard on Intel Platform. Still, those wont cost anywhere close to 8M. To be honest I am very much surprised at how cheap Qualcomm are selling their chip. This is going to be the start of avalanche. Once the software improves and make a self sustainable ecosystem, everything else will come. I still dont believe Qualcomm could achieve their 5% Server target by 2020 goal. But it is still a good start in longer terms success. What is more worrying is Intel's growth and Cash Cow is now at risk in the mid term. It will be interesting to see how Intel react to this. There is serious price pressure from AMD EPYC and Qualcomm Centriq. Intel DC 2018 may ship lower unit YoY and lower revenue / unit YoY. PC market is being attacked by AMD, while not at risk, Intel is definitely earning less as they increase core count. Personally I would have liked to see POWER9 or RISC-V in server space, but both still missing in action.