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The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
- Sebb767 6y agoThese things look awesome, but are pretty expensive, still. I'd love to put an ARM server in my homelab, but the price range between 100$ (RPi & Co) and 10000$ (enterprise server) seems pretty empty right now :/
- xuki 6y agoJust wait for virtualization on M1 Mac.
- oarsinsync 6y agoThat’s useful if you’re not averse to MacOS. Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits, and turning their back on decades of computing history with no “legacy” < 64bit support, I find myself struggling with that choice. Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)
- _ph_ 6y agoThe removing of 32bit support in Catalina was definitely a bad thing for many, who are using x86-Macs, but for someone interesting in an ARM-based Mac, shouldn't play a role.
- corty 6y ago> shouldn't play a role. Until it does. Some future MacOS may need support of some new architecture feature, then it'll be "better buy an Arm13 mac if you want to run MacOS 2023!". Apple doesn't have a very good track record about supporting their own old hardware in new MacOS releases. Several iMacs and MacMinis come to mind. Their past behaviour sets a benchmark for their future behaviour, and since there are no reliable assurances about their support roadmap, I'd think carefully...
- mbreese 6y agoWhat? Big Sur supports hardware that is at least 7 years old. Catalina goes back to 2012 (and still gets security updates). For an OS vendor that has yearly updates, they do a pretty good job of supporting older hardware. https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility
- monocasa 6y agoThe PowerPC->Intel transition led to an OSX release that was Intel only just three years after the first Intel hardware was released. Apple's known for cutting compatibility when they have some goal that's served by it, or it's viewed as an albatross by their product side.
- mbreese 6y agoTrue. It looks like the last PPC Macs were released in 2005 and were available through 2006 [1]. The last OS that supported them was Leopard, which got Security updates though 2009 [2]. [1] https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/ultimate-mac-timeline.html https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/ultimate-mac-timeli... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#Release_histo...
- Xylakant 6y agoEven better: Based on apples history High Sierra probably EOLs January 2021 and supports hardware all the way back to 2010. So that's a decade of hardware support which is pretty good.
- mschuster91 6y ago> Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits You're talking about the certificate revocation check that bypasses VPNs? That one is to prevent malware from being able to hijack and block certificate checks.
- oarsinsync 6y agoNo, I’m talking about regular Apple apps that bypass local software firewalls. See this HN thread from ~2 months ago for an introduction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816 This is new behaviour to Big Sur, breaking existing tooling and providing a back door for Apple, and anyone who can exploit it like this guy https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1327726496203476992 https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1327726496203476992
- bluGill 6y agoThere are several multi-board RPi&Co solutions. Pine64 has some interesting offerings in this space.
- thinkmassive 6y agoTuringPi 2 (for RPi CM4) https://turingpi.com/ https://turingpi.com/ Pine64 SOPINE Clusterboard https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/ https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/
- walrus01 6y agoThe problem with most of these is availability of a Linux operating system image that is as mature, and close to 'stock' debian as raspbian is. Usually it's some two year old version of Ubuntu that's been cobbled together by the vendor.
- qchris 6y agoI believe there's been some work in the this space by the Armbian[1] community, which is aiming to create a unified base distro for a wide range of ARM single-board computers including Odroid, Pine64, etc. [1] https://www.armbian.com/ https://www.armbian.com/
- loudmax 6y agoI built my home compute cluster out of four Odroid N2. These are $80 ARM based single board computers (SBC's), similar to Raspberry Pi's. You can bridge the gap between high and low ends buy buying low end and scaling horizontally. The troublesome piece is, of course, the horizontal scaling. For a cluster of ARM CPUs to be worthwhile, you need a job that can be parallelized, but not so massively parallel that it already runs on a GPU. Even so, I think there's a lot of potential for these low end ARM devices. Ultimately, their impact on x86 could be the same as what x86 did to the previous generation of mini computers.
- SoapSeller 6y agoYou can get SolidRun HoneyComb[0] for ~$1000, it has 16 cores with supposedly reasonable performance. [0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/honeycomb-workstation/ https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...
- cameron_b 6y agoThat puppy is on my wish list if tax refunds are a thing this spring.
- floatboth 6y agoReasonable, but not exciting. Cortex-A72 is quite old by now. Just compare EC2 a1 instances vs. the newer ones.
- nine_k 6y agoJust compare how much such an exciting AWS instance would cost in a month. You can't compare it to owning a whole machine for several years, having bought it once.
- Sebb767 6y agoThis looks what I was searching for. Thank you!
- walrus01 6y agoFor a thousand bucks of CPU, motherboard and RAM, anyone with a modicum of clue building x86-64 industry standard PC hardware could set up something based on Ryzen that runs circles around that. Probably at least quadruple the performance in any integer or floating point benchmarks. $659 ryzen 5800X $250 motherboard
- Someone 6y agoDo I read the table on https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review... incorrectly? To me, it says they have a system with 32 CPUs at 1.7 GHz for $800, and a whole range between $2,200 and $4,050.
- privong 6y agoI think that's the processor only? I'm basing that off the paragraph after the table, which says: > AMD’s EPYC 7742 which still comes in at $6950 A couple quick searches (Amazon, Newegg) show people selling the CPU-only for this price. Since that's the price they're comparing to the table, I think the table prices are for the ARM CPU only.
- Someone 6y agoThanks! I already found $800 cheapish, but didn’t consider it a price for just the CPU; my mind isn’t used to see server prices, it seems.
- walrus01 6y agoI'll believe these are a real viable thing for ordinary open source Linux/BSD developers, when I can go buy a $150 motherboard and a $250 CPU from newegg, that have performance anywhere NEAR what I can do with the equivalent priced Ryzen. Or even some Intel 10th/11th generation core-whatever i5/i7 CPU.
- SlipperySlope 6y agoGood point, I've been looking at NewEgg and Amazon retail ever since the M1, because I need Ubuntu, not Apple. My preference is for a mini form factor without a fan that I can run headless in the office lab.
- Alupis 6y agoIf you are just building a home lab server (ie. don't need a video card, well... usually), you can build a surprisingly powerful, inexpensive system. Probably in the $500-$1000 range depending on CPU choice.
- MikeKusold 6y agoJust like with xeon server hardware, you will need to wait 4-6 years for companies to retire their fleets. r730s are currently reasonably priced (under $1K) but those were released new in 2014. R740s are still a few thousand dollars.
- alexhutcheson 6y agoWhy would you want a 6-year-old server chip? By that point I'd expect a mid-tier consumer chip to have better performance/watt, and much better support for peripherals.
- kumarvvr 6y agoSo, what OS do these run? Is it oem provided custom kernels or third party?
- boudin 6y agoRuns Linux natively it seems: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-altra-q80&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a...
- kumarvvr 6y agoWow. Never knew Linux architecture allowed it to scale on hardware in such a way. Edit : I know Linux is customized to run on a variety of hardware, I was just pointing out that I never knew you could install Ubuntu on the mentioned hardware and have it take advantage of the available hardware, given that it has specialized hardware.
- corty 6y agoLinux ran on 512 processor Altix machines more than a decade ago already.
- ur-whale 6y agoLinux has been running on 2000+ core machines for longer than a decade (at least): https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/how-many-cores-can-linux-kernel-handle https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/how-many-cores...
- boudin 6y agoI love seeing those alternatives to x86, Intel an AMD showing up. After long years of nothing exciting on the CPU side until AMD released Zen, now the M1 from Apple and this, hardware feels exciting again. I also really like the fact that Ampere cpus are not something that will only live in one ecosystem (like the graviton that will, i guess, never exists outside of AWS or the M1 outside of Apple products). I really hope something similar is going to show up for PC as well.
- als0 6y agoThere's an interesting rumor that says AMD is building an ARM SoC for OEMs...
- mtgx 6y agoIf I were them I wouldn't even bother with anything pre-Arm v9. That's going to draw all the hype, especially when Apple announces the Arm v9-based M2 next year. And then I'm sure most sheep-like OEMs will say "Oh, we want THAT, too. Where is it - we want it yesterday!" But AMD won't be able to provide one too soon, because they would've gone all in on Arm v8, and they'd want to squeeze at least a couple of generations out of that microarchitecture. Something similar happened when Apple announced the first Armv8 processor and it took Qualcomm and all the rest 2 years to catch-up.
- coward8675309 6y agoAt the time of the intro of 64 bit ARM, the conventional wisdom was, "Pooh pooh, this'll just bloat your code and not offer any performance advantage whatsoever. How pointlessly stupid!"
- strenholme 6y agoThe problem is that ARMv9, as I type this, is not available. Perhaps ARM holdings and/or NVidia are working on the ARMv9 instruction set, and there has been a lot of speculation about what ARMv9 will be, but so far nothing concrete. [1] ARMv8 (i.e. 64-bit ARM), of course, has been around for a while now. [1] Keep in mind that anything on Reddit not confirmed elsewhere is very likely either wild speculation or made up fiction.
- simplecto 6y agoThis is interesting to see another company take a crack at super-density. Scaleway famously entered this market in 2017 only to leave it in 2020 citing reliability issues [1] Such is the churn and iteration to challenge x86. I welcome it. [1] - https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/21/scaleway_arm64_cloud_end_of_life/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/21/scaleway_arm64_cloud_...
- corty 6y agoNice hardware, but if I order a hundred, how many will I get? Arm servers so far have been vaporware, only available in single-digit quantities after a very long wait. There is a new announcement every half year or so by one firm or the other. But we've never managed to get beyond getting a sample, and not for a lack of trying. Numbers just aren't available, models change extremely fast, producers go bancrupt. Maybe it will get better as soon as one of the big server producers starts with Arms?
- a2tech 6y agoLike Amazon? You know you can get an ARM server there any day of the week for extremely reasonable prices? Edit: to clarify, I mean on AWS, not from the Amazon store.
- iagovar 6y agoIf I can't get a machine for local development I wouldn't care personally. I like the idea of many many threads as I work a lot with data, but i need something like a PC to try things on. Also, don't really like vendor lock-in.
- aljarry 6y agoI'm doing some development on AWS currently on g4dn instance with T4 accelerator. With pings lower than 50ms and remote VS Code it gets really efficient. The biggest issue of course is additional mental burden on being remote + you can't simply print image in ssh console... I thought it would be horrible, but after a brief adjustment period it turned out to be okay-ish for my current work.
- st1ck 6y agoBut you can view images in terminal emulator. Not every one, but kitty, alacritty, st, iTerm2 for MacOS, etc. should support it. This works for me (need to install ueberzug, e.g. via pip): { declare -p c=([action]=add [identifier]=0 [x]=0 [y]=0 [width]=80 [height]=80 [path]="mypic.png") ; sleep 5;} | ueberzug layer --parser bash
- txdv 6y ago32cores for 800$, feasible for a nice home server rig
- blodkorv 6y agobut really, in what way would 32 cores become useful in a home server, except running a bunch of VMs that do nothing or donate money in terms of electricity to folding@home
- txdv 6y agoSince it is ARM, running them at 0% would use little electricity :)
- mhh__ 6y agoI assume because of leakage current the basic power usage at low-load isn't all that different for the same amount of chip real estate
- zdkl 6y agoBeefy CPU, couple TB of HDDs and an SSD to boot off of: (comfortably) host your own private cloud. And probably a <whatever social/messaging solution you prefer> instance for your friends & family too if you're feeling adventurous. Via authenticated Tor Hidden Services, for optimum easy-safe ratio. Now the value of a private cloud is a subjective question, true, but personal experience suggests having it right there on home lan encourages practical use, especially in a shared flat.
- throwaway2048 6y agoall of that could be trivially done on a raspberry pi for $30 instead of a massively overspeced ARM server for $10000
- zdkl 6y agoI agree, that's what I'm rocking: a bunch of 8gig pi's doing everything from RAM, and a threadripper DB server. All at home, all for <3k out front. Equivalent monthly bill at a major hoster would be >200/month more than electricity + the cost of <low single digit> hours needed. The same setup with a more reasonably priced consumer proc (but no ECC) would be around 1.5k out front.
- panpanna 6y agoHas anyone tried machine learning on this or the Graviton2? I understand TPUs and GPUs easily beat these guys but it would still be interesting to see what raw cpu power can achieve in 2020.
- walki 6y ago> Has anyone tried machine learning on this or the Graviton2? I have not done any machine learning on AWS Graviton2 CPUs but I ran many other CPU benchmarks on Graviton2 CPUs and overall I have been disappointed by their performance. They are still much slower than current x64 CPUs (x64 CPUs are up to 2x faster in single thread mode). According to the benchmarks from Anandtech the Ampere Altra should have much better performance than Graviton2 CPUs as its performance is neck to neck with the fastest x64 CPUs.
- nayuki 6y agoI keep seeing the Google Chrome logo in the fan frame: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16315/X-T30_DSF3724_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16315/X-T30_DSF3724_575px....
- alkonaut 6y agoHow close are Intel to releasing anything that's a "next gen" core design and not just incremental design change or node shrink? When will Intel's "Zen2" arrive? Are there any rumors?
- abarringer 6y agoSemiAccurate thinks no where on the horizon. They have a good track record on these things. See this for example. https://www.semiaccurate.com/2020/11/12/intel-delays-a-mainstream-server-platform-once-again/ https://www.semiaccurate.com/2020/11/12/intel-delays-a-mains...
- jeffbee 6y agoNo need to go by rumors. Intel themselves have announced that Ice Lake SP won't happen until mid-2021. They showed off some stuff at SC'20 last month, but since it's possible that Zen3 EPYC "Milan" will launch at the same time or even before, it's impossible to say what their competitive position will look like when they finally ship it.
- acomjean 6y agoHopefully they get it together. Competition is good for us consumers. They could end up being a low end x86 vendor.
- khyryk 6y agoAlder Lake will be a big-little design on 10nm, probably coming in Q3 2021.
- kllrnohj 6y agoOn the server? Unknown. Anywhere at all? They already did - two iterations, in fact. Ice Lake uses the new Sunny Cove uArch and Tiger Lake uses the successor to Sunny Cove called Willow Cove. And Tiger Lake is fine but not great: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review... Rocket Lake is supposedly a "backport" of Sunny Cove to 14nm for desktop, coming Q1 2020.
- cameron_b 6y agoThis line is the kicker for me: "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." The rest of the paragraph twists the knife more, and declares there to be an open market on server hardware for AMD and Ampere to fight it out. With application stacks being what they are and optimizations for Xeon so deeply integrated, it's unlikely that folks running private datacenters actually feel the same way, but if I was spinning up a new company with the sort of funding to be able to decide between self-hosted or cloud I would have some math to do.
- nine_k 6y agoI can imagine that every cloud hosting provider expands their fleet of machines, and also retires and replaces some of it. If the expansion and replacement will mostly involve AMD and ARM-based solutions, I won't be surprised. Of course Xeons are going to stay for a relatively long time, because some customers are deeply invested in them, e.g. relying on AVX512 heavily, etc. I also don't think that Intel is going to go under. AMD was in the position of a second-rate player for decades, and had expensive failures, too (remember Bulldozer?). So I expect them to regroup and show us something amazing in, say, 5 years. But one thing they are.going to lose: their sweet big margins.
- klelatti 6y agoI think the big issues for Intel will be avoiding getting into a vicious circle of uncompetitive performance -> lower margins -> less investment in process /fabs -> uncompetitive performance In part AMD broke out of this by using TSMC, but Intel relying on (not just using) TSMC would be a huge step.
- nine_k 6y agoI bet there will be enough interest in keeping a top-tier fab facility and expertise on the US soil. If I were DoD, I would be very interested, for instance.
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- tlamponi 6y agoSo how are the cores interconnected? As ARM server designs love to throw out tens to hundreds of cores which sounds good on paper, but are not really useful to lots of workloads as they have a shit interconnect or lots of NUMA nodes. Interconnect is key, e.g., see the improvements between zen2 and zen3, especially for the `4 < cores <= 8` models - which stem mostly from having 8 cores per die with direct good interconnect, instead of two dies with only 4 cores. An anecdote: I got some hands on a box with a Cavium ThunderX2 96 logical core processor about two years ago, kernel compiled slower than on my high-end, but non overclocked and common, i7 based workstation from ~ 2015 - that is certainly not to a statistical relevant comparison and there may be some workloads that do good with those CPUs, but it's neither single thread nor massively parallel, maybe something in between...
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoThis is a dumb question. But as you've said, cores per die has a strong influence on how performant a system is and that's because of the processor interconnects. My question is, what are the processors saying to each other?
- Nabati 6y ago"knock knock" "who's there?"
- tolien 6y agoIn the case of Zen/Zen2, some of the dies didn't have direct access to main memory but went through an adjacent die's memory controller and channel. This had a performance and latency effect, and required some extra work on the part of OS schedulers to make sure that tasks weren't being scheduled on related cores. It's (relatively) easy to have lots of cores on one die, it's not so easy to keep them fed.
- MarioMan 6y agoModern CPUs like these are shared memory multiprocessors. Programs on these CPUs are often designed to run on multiple cores at the same time to improve performance, necessitating communication between cores, to coordinate and share work between each other. Since each core typically has a private cache, most communication in a system like this will typically involve cache coherence protocols to ensure cores have a consistent view of memory contents. Adding more cores increases the overall complexity of the system. The latency of these protocols grows with more cores as interconnections become more "distant", across processor interconnects. Minimizing latency and effectively scaling to more cores is a difficult problem to solve while staying within silicon and thermal budgets.
- tony-avantek 6y agoCommercial Warning... Just in case anyone is interested in obtaining their own Altra system, they are available for pre-order here: https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoIs this capable of doing hardware transcoding?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI'm surprised I searched this whole thread and didn't see a single mention of NVIDIA! It seems everyone wants either Intel or AMD to pivot to ARM64 (very unlikely) in the server space. But with NVIDIA's $40 billion purchase of ARM -- I wonder what they're cooking up? I think a high-performance ARM64 CPU from NVIDIA with an on-die GPU would be a great offering. In many benchmarks it's actually the on-die GPU that makes the M1 so much faster. A general purpose on-die GPU would help speed up a lot of low and mid-level cloud workloads, especially with native kernel support. Good luck, NVIDIA. And godspeed!
- lend000 6y agoThis article is the first CPU review I've seen that lacks both benchmark numbers and information about the manufacturer/process node. Is there a more technical document describing the Altra?
- ksec 6y ago7nm.
- IanCutress 6y agoDid you go to page 2. There are several pages, with lots of benchmark numbers.
- soygul 6y agoFrom the comments: > Each Neoverse N1 core with 1MB L2 is just 1.4mm^2, so 80 of them add up to 112mm^2. The die size is estimated at about 350mm^2, so tiny compared to the total ~1100mm^2 in EPYC 7742. So performance/area is >3x that of EPYC. Now that is efficiency!
- lazylizard 6y agoer. so how much for 1u chassis, 512gb ram, 2 x 1tb nvme, 4 x 10gbe nic, dual psu? what can i run on this? proxmox? kubernetes? or 4u chassis, 128gb ram, 2 x 128gb nvme, 4 x 10gbe nic, 100 x 16tb sata ? what can i run on this? centos? Ubuntu? zfs? gluster?
- timthorn 6y agohttps://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-mt-jade.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-mt-jade.html They've only got the 2U and no SATA, but that page prices up the rest of your specs. You can run CentOS, Ubuntu, ZFS and Gluster.