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Arm's Neoverse cores are doing pretty well in the datacenter space — on AWS, the Graviton2 instances are currently the best ones for lots of use cases. It's cle

Arm's Neoverse cores are doing pretty well in the datacenter space — on AWS, the Graviton2 instances are currently the best ones for lots of use cases. It's clear that core designs by Arm are really good. The problem currently is the lag between the design being done and various vendors' chips incorporating it. upd: oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now

rubatuga 5y ago
Fujitsu flying under the radar while having the fastest cpu ever made haha
kllrnohj 5y ago
Graviton2 is competitive sometimes with Epyc, but also falls far behind in some tests (eg, Java performance is a bloodbath). Overall across majority tests, Neoverse consistently comes up short of Milan even when Neoverse is given a core-count advantage. And critically the per-core performance of Graviton2 / Neoverse is worse, and per-core performance is what matters to consumer space. But it can't just be competitive it needs to be significantly better in order for the consumer space to care. Nobody is going to run Windows on ARM just to get equivalent performance to Windows on X86, especially not when that means most apps will be worse. That's what's really impressive about the M1, and so far is very unique to Apple's ARM cpus. > oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now A64FX doesn't appear to be a particularly good CPU core, rather it's a SIMD powerhouse. It's the AVX-512 problem - when you can use it, it can be great. But you mostly can't, so it's mostly dead weight. Obviously in HPC space this is different scenario entirely, but that's not going to translate to consumer space at all (and it's not an ARM advantage, either - 512bit SIMD hit consumer space via x86 first with Intel's Rocket Lake).
- klelatti 5y ago
  Not sure why you're placing so much weight on Epyc outperforming Graviton but discounting designs / use cases where Arm is clearly now better. Plus it's clear that we are just at the beginning of a period where some firms with very deep pockets are starting to invest seriously in Arm on the server and the desktop. If x64 ISA had major advantages over Arm then that would be significant, but I've not heard anyone make that case: instead it's a debate about how big the Arm advantage is. Can x64 remain competitive in some segments: probably and inertia will work in its favour. I do think it's inevitable that we will see a major shift to Arm though.

rubatuga 5y ago

Fujitsu flying under the radar while having the fastest cpu ever made haha

kllrnohj 5y ago

Graviton2 is competitive sometimes with Epyc, but also falls far behind in some tests (eg, Java performance is a bloodbath). Overall across majority tests, Neoverse consistently comes up short of Milan even when Neoverse is given a core-count advantage. And critically the per-core performance of Graviton2 / Neoverse is worse, and per-core performance is what matters to consumer space. But it can't just be competitive it needs to be significantly better in order for the consumer space to care. Nobody is going to run Windows on ARM just to get equivalent performance to Windows on X86, especially not when that means most apps will be worse. That's what's really impressive about the M1, and so far is very unique to Apple's ARM cpus. > oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now A64FX doesn't appear to be a particularly good CPU core, rather it's a SIMD powerhouse. It's the AVX-512 problem - when you can use it, it can be great. But you mostly can't, so it's mostly dead weight. Obviously in HPC space this is different scenario entirely, but that's not going to translate to consumer space at all (and it's not an ARM advantage, either - 512bit SIMD hit consumer space via x86 first with Intel's Rocket Lake).

klelatti 5y ago
Not sure why you're placing so much weight on Epyc outperforming Graviton but discounting designs / use cases where Arm is clearly now better. Plus it's clear that we are just at the beginning of a period where some firms with very deep pockets are starting to invest seriously in Arm on the server and the desktop. If x64 ISA had major advantages over Arm then that would be significant, but I've not heard anyone make that case: instead it's a debate about how big the Arm advantage is. Can x64 remain competitive in some segments: probably and inertia will work in its favour. I do think it's inevitable that we will see a major shift to Arm though.