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Ampere Altra 80-core ARM CPU
- cameron_b 7y ago192 PCIe Gen4 lanes in 2P platforms - looks like they're optimizing for next-gen storage bandwidth or potentially GPU / TPU integrations. This could be interesting from a company that's been busy working on their B-to-B sales, hopefully solving for problems that cloud platform providers actually have.
- mmoez 7y agoGrowing sick of the trend of naming companies after famous scientists...
- derision 7y agoWhy? What should they name it after instead?
- posterboy 7y agoinnovation, not copying anyone?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derision 7y agoThere's billions of products in existence. I don't think each one having an "innovative" name provides any value at all. And copying is the highest form of flattery. If I had spent my life researching electricity and found out the most innovative company in the electric vehicle and battery industry was named after me I would feel quite proud
- strbean 7y agoThat sounds like a recipe for names like Innotek and Infobang.
- monocasa 7y agoYou know that's a unit of electricity as well, right?
- new_realist 7y agoA unit of electricity named after a famous scientist.
- myself248 7y agoJust as soon as my Kardashian is charged up, I'll swing by your place to drop off the new samples of the 128-core Bieber X.
- rwmj 7y agoFor context this is an evolution of the Applied Micro X-gene (I believe this is the 3rd generation). The 1st gen was the famous Mustang, one of the first Aarch64 chips generally available that ran Linux. I still have one in my loft somewhere. Edit: I should note that if you used the X-gene 1 it was very slow, albeit a reliable workhorse for early 64-bit ARM Linux development. These newer chips have far better performance.
- eb0la 7y agoI see Ampere eMag is supported by OpenBSD (https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html) :-) It had "only" 32 cores. I still find it a lot. I guess it would be easy to port OpenBSD to the Altra since it boots from UEFI.
- floatboth 7y agoYes. There is no "porting" with new SBSA/SBBR systems — only fixing bugs and/or adding quirks :) On FreeBSD for the eMAG, we've had to: - ignore a wrong value for UART access width https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346228 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34622... (IIRC Ampere did fix the value in the newer FW revisions) - restore another register after calling EFI runtime services https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346996 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34699... - fix some PCIe things we were doing wrong https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347929 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34792... https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347930 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34793... - fix some memory map things https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=349588 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34958...
- cameron_b 7y agoThe meandering paths that these different processor families take is interesting on its own. eMag and the Thunder X2 are expensive to develop but so promising that the product seems to find a new gear even when one company runs our of steam developing it. That or they find a new C-Suite group that has the same opinion as me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tmikaeld 7y agoI'm curious how this will perform vs AMD's Epyc line in terms of performance per Watt on different workloads.
- drewg123 7y agoIt depends on the workload. We tried the ampere emag, and what killed it for us was that TLS performance was nowhere near modern x86-64 CPUs (Intel or AMD)
- cameron_b 7y agodid you use them on Packet?
- magicalhippo 7y agoAs a n00b, is that down to poor or lacking encryption hardware support ala AES-NI? Or something else?
- drewg123 7y agoYes.
- floatboth 7y agoYou did make sure the AES instructions were used, right? I wouldn't be surprised the AES unit on the eMAG is relatively slow — other units seem to be as well, e.g. in my silly CRC32 benchmark, the Arm Cortex-A72 did 1kb in 79 ns at just 2.0 GHz while the eMAG did it in 103 ns at much faster clocks (3.0 or 3.3 GHz). I suspect they might have reused these HW blocks from the old Applied Micro X-Gene :D But now on the new product, it's all Arm Neoverse cores, it's gonna be great.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoWas that heavily cipher dependent? I wouldn't be surprised if Chacha20 performed much better than AES w/o any hardware acceleration (other than SIMD instructions)
- eecc 7y agoWhat’s the point of these wall of text without some hardware-porn? ;)
- eoerl 7y agothe key issue when compared to Epyc is that this is mono-die, and not much faster (even with metrics straight from Ampere). Mono-die means that the die is huge, the yield is low, it's probably pretty expensive to produce (and the reason why they went for 32MB cache, well below Arm's recommendations, core count is a bigger seller than cache it seems). Unless they get massively better performance (they don't), this has no chance vs a multi-die solution which has a much better yield. Intel is cornered in a similar situation right now. The same applies to Graviton, this stands absolutely no chance in the long run. Not saying that the future has to be multi-die, but if it is not, then it has to be way faster than the cheaper-to-manufacture competition.
- ksec 7y ago>the key issue when compared to Epyc is that this is mono-die, This die cost metrics is way overblown and its narrative is too narrowly focused. Especially on ARM Server where unit cost dynamics with ARM IP along with much higher margin on server CPU lower the multi die BOM benefits. And the same definitely does not apply to Graviton, which Amazon owns the whole stack.
- eoerl 7y agoAmazon owns nothing, not the ARM IP nor the manufacturing chain (TSMC or Samsung most probably), in that field it's not a big player. It owns what it does with Graviton, that's pretty much it. Else yield obviously counts, that's what stands in the way of this CPU having more cache or 160 cores, for what it's worth, so it has to count for something obviously. The multiple tiers in every cpu manufacturer line up is also a consequence of yield, so it's very much not a minor element of the equation
- shdh 7y agoI disagree. More chips per wafer results in more yield, less chips with potential flaws. > Dr. Hansch’s research at Universitat Munchen for example, shows how as die size increases manufacturers realize an accelerating yield loss and thus accelerating manufacturing cost. Using their model, assuming best-case defect densities, AMD’s small chiplet approach achieves 90% yields vs. Intel’s 30%-40% yields from its large, monolithic die approach. [1] [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/amd-stock-can-gain-87-fund-manager-51566400829 https://www.barrons.com/articles/amd-stock-can-gain-87-fund-...
- wmf 7y agoSTH has the slides and some analysis: https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-altra-80-arm-cores-for-cloud/ https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-altra-80-arm-cores-for-c...
- ksec 7y agoYes, was about to post that, much better than the PR. Anandtech also has its take on it as well. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n1-soc-for-hyperscalers-against-rome-and-xeon https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n...
- dang 7y agoOk, we've changed to that from https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-altra-industrys-first-80-core-server-processor-unveiled/ https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-altra-industrys-first-80-.... Thanks!
- Patrick-STH 7y agoHi dang. I know you did not have to do that but I just wanted to say from the STH team we appreciate it. Have a great day.
- m0zg 7y agoLooks like a company by a bunch of ex-Intel people. How are they doing on Spectre/Meltdown and other bugs caused by the culture of cutting corners?
- inputError 7y agoIt's run by the same lady that made Intel buy McAffee in 2010 for several billion. Years after it was already a dumpster fire. Yeah, I'm staying away from their products.
- wmf 7y agoThe N1 core was designed by Arm Austin. It includes "The traps for EL1 and EL0 cache controls, PSTATE SSBS (Speculative Store Bypass Safe) bit that supports software mitigation for Spectre Variant 4, and the speculation barriers (CSDB, SSBB, PSSBB) instructions..."
- imtringued 7y agoHow long until they shut it down? ARM vendors are infamous for quitting before releasing their products.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoThe category is here to stay, regardless of which company is the first to make it stick. Probably better to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- jnwatson 7y ago"What we will note is that Ampere de-rated both the AMD EPYC 7742 and Xeon Platinum 8280 results by 16.5% and 24% respectively. This was done to adjust for using GCC versus AOCC2.0 and ICC 19.0.1.144. Ampere disclosed this, and it is a big impact. Arm servers tend to use GCC as the compiler while there are more optimized compilers out there for AMD and Intel." If I read this right, they reduce their competitors' benchmarks because they have better compilers? Can anyone justify this?
- wmf 7y agoIf you assume that most real customers use a regular compiler like GCC or Clang then benchmarks using tuned compilers like AOCC (never heard of it before today) or ICC are unrepresentative. However, the proper way to make such a comparison would be to run benchmarks using GCC on all the chips, not to apply magic derating factors. Shame on Ampere for such voodoo benchmarketing. Oh, and don't miss the 3.0 vs. 3.3 GHz.
- Patrick-STH 7y agoGCC is the open-source compiler that is used all over. Not every AMD EPYC system people are using AOCC2.0 on. Likewise, people do not only compile code on ICC that is used on Intel Xeons. Arm has focused efforts on getting optimizations in GCC because it is so popular. Generally, that is why we prefer to publish "compiler optimized" as best-case performance as well as "GCC" as more of the least common denominator. Both sets of data points are important. Official SPECint published numbers will not use GCC because the organizations that submit them always want to see the best performance. Ampere used a scaling factor off of published numbers. If you want to see the impact, we have some numbers from my ThunderX2 review: https://www.servethehome.com/cavium-thunderx2-review-benchmarks-real-arm-server-option/5/ https://www.servethehome.com/cavium-thunderx2-review-benchma... You can see the impact clearly there even though that was from a few years ago. Cray has a better performing compiler for ThunderX2 but we did not get to use it due to licensing restrictions. I hope that helps. The bigger need is for more data since this is one view of performance. There are other needs as well such as FP performance.
- ksec 7y ago
- purplezooey 7y agoIt would be neater if it were the Core Ultra 80-amp CPU
- walrus01 7y agoI've said this before on HN, but no ARM platform is going to catch on for server use, chicken or egg problem, until people can buy a reasonably priced ATX motherboard and CPU by themselves and build a PC with it. The motherboard needs to have the same complement of I/O and bus ports that you can find on a $90 to $120 category x86-64 motherboard. There is nothing anywhere near the performance of what I can get right now by buying a $110 motherboard from one of the top six Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, and a $150 Ryzen 3000 series to socket into it. Linux and *BSD developers are not going to be shelling out $6000 for a 2U rackmount noisy system that's impossible to operate nicely in their home offices.
- wmf 7y agoARM servers already happened; they're in production at AWS and probably MS. Most of the software development is already done; since developers wouldn't buy $6000 machines they just got access to them for free.
- russler23 7y agoI remember when Linux on Arm was the new hotness. That was 2005.
- SloopJon 7y agoIs there a consensus pick for the best ARM system around $1,000? I'm not looking for my main workstation, just something usable for building and running ARM software, and maybe acting as a host for ARM containers. I've seen a few options: Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit - 8 cores, 32 GB, for $700 HoneyComb LX2K mini-ITX motherboard - 16 cores, up to 64 GB, $750 96Boards Developerbox (Socionext) - 24 cores, 32+ GB, $1,200 I'd like a little more than the 4 cores and 4 GB you can get with a Jetson Nano or Raspberry Pi 4.
- fulafel 7y agoThis was probably the case back when home assembled assembled desktop PCs were a big part of the software developer user base, but nowadays the important dev platforms are laptops and Digitalocean/GCP/EC2.