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Ampere EMAG 64bit Arm Workstation
- fotcorn 8y agoThe only available CPU from Ampere EMAG seems to be the 8180, so I think this workstation also uses this. Wikichip: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ampere_computing/emag/8180 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ampere_computing/emag/8180 AnandTech: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14141/ampere-emag-in-the-cloud-32-arm-core-instance-for-1hr https://www.anandtech.com/show/14141/ampere-emag-in-the-clou... TL;DR: 32 Cores, up to 3.3 Ghz boost, 32MB L3 cache, 125W TDP
- Zenst 8y agoIf you click customize/add to cart you see a breakdown with the CPU listed separately as: Ampere eMAG 8180 32 core 2.8GHz 3MB L3 (Turbo 3.3GHz) . So you are right.
- wmf 8y agoWhere have I seen that model number before... oh yeah: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/120496/intel-xeon-platinum-8180-processor-38-5m-cache-2-50-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/120496/...
- Rafuino 8y agoHow convenient to use the same number as the top bin Xeon CPU, eh? Can't copyright a number though, of course.
- phoenix3200 8y agoHilariously enough, that's why it was called a Pentium and not a 586.
- Rafuino 8y agoYep, I'm definitely familiar with the history coming from Intel :)
- 0x8BADF00D 8y agoSpeaking of Xeon, you could probably put together a much cheaper workstation with an older Xeon over the eMag. I just don’t see myself picking this up, at its current price point.
- zokier 8y agoWithout knowing what the perf is like, it is really difficult to say. 32 cores @ 2.8-3.3 GHz sounds like quite a lot, I don't think getting 32 core Xeon would be anywhere near as cheap as this.
- scruffyherder 8y agothere is a chinese motherboard that'll drive 2 xeon processors. It fits in a E-ATX case. It should be ~ $250 USD shipped. I used some cheap ($20 USD!) Xeons (E5-2620v2) and have 24 cores.. so it's doable for $500.
- mrslave 8y agoTo which model of motherboard dost thou allude?
- pantalaimon 8y agoIt's also based on the Skylark microarchitecture.
- wmf 8y agoPacket also has eMAG for $1/hour in the cloud if you want to try before you buy: https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-arm/ https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-arm/ Geekbench scores: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/11678329?baseline=12589322 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/11678329?baseli...
- reikonomusha 8y agoLooks like Packet is sold out in all regions.
- joshka 8y agoIs there some context on what is notable about this?
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoI've never seen a high-performance workstation based on an ARM cpu before.
- dragontamer 8y agoThunder X2 Arm servers came out first. But its good to see competition as always.
- copperx 8y agoThis is what Linus was asking for, in order for ARM to make strides in the server market.
- topspin 8y agoThe price doesn't momentarily stop respiration either. If I needed a pile of cores for something I'd consider it.
- amelius 8y agoYes, can we at least get some benchmarks?
- topspin 8y agoThat case surprised me. I just built an Intel based Linux system using that exact case; it's a "be quiet!" Pure Base 600 Black [1]. They "debranded" the case in the photo with a low-effort edit. [1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68V57M4892 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68V57M4...
- kencausey 8y agoSlightly off-topic but what do you think of the case at this point?
- jayalpha 8y agoLooks ugly, and why not buy a rack?
- mrweasel 8y agoRacks are terrible as desktops
- jayalpha 8y agoWhy?
- sliken 8y agoGenerally rack based equipment is designed with less vertical height and strict front to back airflow. They are also often designed for relatively high input temperatures, so they are designed for high airflow rates. These combine to be very loud and often crazy inefficient. Read that as consuming significant power to cool the equipment. Mini/Mid/Full tower cases generally are designed to take advantage of heat wanting to raise. So the intakes are often large and low (140mm is not unusual), and the top rear for the exhaust. Even 200mm isn't unusual for the exhaust. Air moving efficient increases quickly with fan size. 1U fans often move at 15k rpm and make more noise and vibration than anything else. Desktop fans are often 1200 rpm or lower and just take a few watts to dump substantial heat. As an example the Fractal Design Mini C (a small, quiet, under $100 case) has room for 2 x 140mm in the lower front, and 2 x 140mm on top. It's a smaller case, so there's only 120mm in the rear. With $80 ish for the case and a few extra fans (Fractal design isn't bad, but not quite class leading) you can easily dump a few 100 watts quietly. Find a rack mount case that can move as much air as quietly is challenging and when possible often prohibitively expensive and/or crazy loud. Last time I build one to house a single socket motherboard and a GPU (much like a desktop) it included 4 delta fans that I needed ear protection on to be in the same room.
- newnewpdro 8y agoAnyone know where this machine would stand with regards to Respects Your Freedom [1] certification barriers? [1] https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-f...
- Skunkleton 8y agoI cannot comment on this chip in particular, but my experience is that most arm platforms have unavoidable non-free firmware.
- dis-sys 8y ago"As low as £2,255.00" GBPUSD is trading at 1.3
- admax88q 8y agoAt this price I would rather buy a Raptor TALOS II or Blackbird.
- fungi 8y agoat that price i don't think punters are the target demographic. if your build target is an arm environment (industrial, embeded?) or you are a uni teaching/researching arm isa, then i imagine it would be a pretty nice bit of kit.
- Skunkleton 8y agoIf your target is some embedded device, you will still end up cross compiling for your target. ISA is only part of the picture.
- floatboth 8y agoWith Talos II, you'd get a workstation with only 4 cores at this price. Blackbird board + 8-core CPU bundle is a bit better, but now you're limited by the small form factor.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoI'm not sure what performance looks like on 4 POWER cores vs 32 ARM cores; seems like it might win. Genuinely curious; would love to see benchmarks.
- DCKing 8y agoThose 4 POWER9 cores (16 threads with its 4-way SMT) will obliterate this ARM. Depending on the benchmark, this 32 core ARM box will do 1/2 the single thread performance and about 2.5x the multithreaded performance of my venerable Sandy Bridge i7 desktop (so it does 2.5x the MT performance with 8x the amount of physical cores). This is a hardware class from 2011, which you can usually pick up for under $250 from eBay in second-hand corporate desktops. On the other hand, the POWER9 in the Talos II can go toe-to-toe with Intel's Skylake in both single thread and especially multithreaded use cases. The reason to buy a workstation like this is not performance, but rather being able to natively develop ARM software locally. That's the only real killer feature it has over Intel/AMD/IBM processors, but a legitimate reason to buy it given the availability of ARM servers at cloud providers.
- auvi 8y agojust wondering, is any US based shop selling similar machines?
- nottorp 8y agoIs there anything similar but more hobbyist priced? DIY would be fine, but all motherboards that I know of don’t have ram slots or other desktop like amenities
- linux4kix 8y agohttps://www.cnx-software.com/2019/03/29/clearfog-itx-workstation-ultimate-arm-developer-platform/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/03/29/clearfog-itx-worksta...
- nottorp 8y agoThat link whined at me for denying targeted advertising instead of showing me the article so I guess I wont ever know what its about...
- linux4kix 8y agohttps://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/clearfog-itx/ https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/clearfog-itx/ better :) we just announced it.
- floatboth 8y agoHi, I posted a comment on cnx-software but it's awaiting moderation, reposting here: > work with Linaro on the work they did for the MCBin to get a UEFI plugin that uses a QEMU emulation layer for supporting booting Video Card BIOS Linaro? I thought the EDK2 for the MCbin was maintained by Semihalf :) Anyway, 16 cores and dual-channel RAM for $500 is a lot more interesting than 4 cores and single-channel for $269. A few questions: Will the EDK2 tree be fully open source? There was that one blob on the MCbin… Will the core be overclockable?
- linux4kix 8y agoSemihalf is maintaining the tree and patches, but I believe the original work done to support using a GPU on the platform was done by Linaro. I could be mis-remembering but I believe that is how things happened. We are waiting for the final release of the EDK2 tree from NXP. I will refrain from promising anything until that is integrated. The cores are not overclockable. 2.2Ghz will be the limit.
- nottorp 8y ago
- glangdale 8y agoI've used a machine with this chip (remotely). It's not terrible; Daniel Lemire blogs about some early performance impressions here https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison-skylark-arm-versus-skylake-intel/ https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison-skylark-a... and I've ported simdjson to it (https://github.com/lemire/simdjson https://github.com/lemire/simdjson). I'm definitely not at the stage where I can say anything definitive about performance. For a SIMD-intensive task, a preliminary run on a 3.3Ghz eMag core gets about 400 megabytes/second of JSON parsing relative to 2.2 gigabytes/second on a 4.0Ghz Skylake. This may come down to having a maximum of 2 x 128-bit NEON operations per cycle vs 3 x 256 AVX2 operations per cycle, as well as some clock speed differences. Will eventually post about this at branchfree.org when I don my Nomex long johns (required whenever doing any benchmark that might imply to anyone that any processor runs faster or slower than any other processor).
- linux4kix 8y agoJust tested the Daniel's tests against our 16 Core LX2160 that is still only clocked at 1.9Ghz (will be 2.2Ghz final production). These are our numbers binarytrees: 37s mandelbrot: 13.6s fasta: 0.9s I will give your benchmark a run once I have some time.
- linux4kix 8y agoOkay I couldn't help myself, waiting for a build to finish. ./parse jsonexamples/twitter.json Min: 0.00171284 bytes read: 631514 Gigabytes/second: 0.368695
- glangdale 8y agoWhoa, thanks. 368, huh? That's pretty impressive given the 1.9Ghz clock speed... By coincidence, the 'twitter.json' file was the one I was using as my slender data point. Do note that at this stage the benchmark is so preliminary as to be largely meaningless - I haven't really done much more than eyeball the results. But as a preliminary data point, that seems to be a stronger showing clock-for-clock than the eMag one.
- andersm 8y agoOut of personal interest, I did some very unscientific benchmarking by timing a build of the Yocto core-image-sato distro for the BeagleBone. All sourcecode was downloaded beforehand, so that does not factor into the results. All the machines were running Ubuntu 18.04 Server except the A10, which runs Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop. Here are the results: 34m9.347s EPYC 7401P 24C/48T 2.2GHz (Packet c2.medium.x86 bare metal server) 75m14.661s eMAG 32C/32T 3.3GHz (Packet c2.large.arm bare metal server) 96m31.901s i5-8259U 4C/8T 2.30-3.80GHz (Intel NUC8I5, NVMe SSD) 139m52.184s ThunderX 96C/96T 2.0GHz (Packet c1.large.arm bare metal server) 194m52.745s A10-6800K 4C/4T 4.1GHz (Old self-built desktop, slow-ish SSD) 535m52.642s Celeron N3150 4C/4T 1.60-2.08GHz (Gigabyte Brix, SSD) I assume the eMAG results will improve somewhat once its support matures, but the difference to the i5 is disappointingly small. Both ARM machines performed reasonably well when all cores were used, but the relatively weak per-core performance showed whenever utilization fell. But although the ThunderX was slow, looking at 96 cores in htop felt pretty good...