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Given the weak single core performance despite running at 3 GHz, and the ARM v8.0 compliance (ARM v8.5 is published, Apple is on ARM v8.4), is this not some thi

by DCKing 6y ago

Given the weak single core performance despite running at 3 GHz, and the ARM v8.0 compliance (ARM v8.5 is published, Apple is on ARM v8.4), is this not some thin repackaging of the ARM Cortex A72/73 IP as a server processor? Cortex A73 phones (at peak 2.5 GHz) also do 30ish % of a high end Intel chip in single threaded benchmarks... I don't have a good smoking gun to know for sure they went this route, but this thing doesn't seem to exceed Android smartphone performance at least. You're not going to be making a very appealing workstation by just throwing old mobile focused ARM licensed IP together (or by something that looks and performs a lot like it). Shame the only party thinking in the direction of workstation like performance for ARM is Apple. Then again, making good workstation chips requires a lot of money. Guess they have to have a market first.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
It's using a 2017 core because it's an early-2018 chip. They've got a more modern chip in development (the Altra) with the Neoverse-N1 core, the same core used in Graviton2.
floatboth 6y ago
This is the last evolution of the quite old APM X-Gene microarchitecture and you can see it's way worse per clock than Cortex-A72. Ampere just had to have something out of the door in 2019 I guess. The new Ampere "Altra" chip is going to be like an Amazon Graviton2, but higher clocked, so that's going to be really fast.
- StillBored 6y ago
  Which is great, but will there be 16-32 core version that average mortals can afford, or is it going to be another thunderX2 workstation? The latter (https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-thunderxstation-cavium-thunderx2-socs https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-thunderxstatio...) is a pretty serious piece of developer hardware, with much better single thread perf, and 64 cores. But its also quite spendy, and you have to be a really serious arm developer to be able to justify one.

by DCKing 6y ago

bryanlarsen 6y ago

It's using a 2017 core because it's an early-2018 chip. They've got a more modern chip in development (the Altra) with the Neoverse-N1 core, the same core used in Graviton2.

floatboth 6y ago

This is the last evolution of the quite old APM X-Gene microarchitecture and you can see it's way worse per clock than Cortex-A72. Ampere just had to have something out of the door in 2019 I guess. The new Ampere "Altra" chip is going to be like an Amazon Graviton2, but higher clocked, so that's going to be really fast.

StillBored 6y ago
Which is great, but will there be 16-32 core version that average mortals can afford, or is it going to be another thunderX2 workstation? The latter (https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-thunderxstation-cavium-thunderx2-socs https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-thunderxstatio...) is a pretty serious piece of developer hardware, with much better single thread perf, and 64 cores. But its also quite spendy, and you have to be a really serious arm developer to be able to justify one.