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Arm Announces Neoverse V1, N2 Platforms and CPUs, CMN-700 Mesh
- akmittal 5y agoApple's M1 has made ARM mainstream for laptops, Lets see which company does same for server space. Hopefully ARM on cloud will result in cheaper prices.
- lifty 5y agoApple's M1 will make ARM mainstream on the server side.
- leesalminen 5y agoPersonally, I don’t see many server admins choosing to pay the Apple Tax to get M1 into their data center. I don’t see how the watt/performance ratio could pay off that kind of tax.
- lifty 5y agoI did not mean to imply that the actual M1 will be used in data centers. Apple is quite popular among developers and its also a trendsetter which will probably lead to other computer manufacturers to adopt ARM for personal computers. So having more people use ARM on their personal computers will lead to more ARM adoption in the data center.
- leesalminen 5y agoAh, ok, I understand. Thanks for clarifying!
- wayneftw 5y ago> Apple is quite popular among developers... The great majority of developers use Windows or Linux according to every Stack Overflow survey from the past ten years. Only ~25% use a Mac.
- alireza94 5y agoI believe interpreting statistics from those surveys in this way isn't fair. There are so many developers around the world but the pattern of value/money generation by them is not uniform; in other words, a small percentage of developers work for companies that pay the largest share of server bills and penetration rate of macOS devices among developers of top companies is probably higher than average. (I'm not implying that developers who work on non-macOS devices, make less value because your device doesn't have - nearly - anything to do with your impact. I'm just talking about a trend and possible misinterpretation of data)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kalleboo 5y ago25% is still "quite popular". If 25% of servers switch to ARM that is massive.
- simondotau 5y agoThe OP wasn't suggesting Apple M1 chips in the data centre, but rather that Apple M1 chips in developer workstations will disrupt the inertia of x64 dev –> x64 prod. It will be easier for developers to choose ARM in production when their local box is ARM.
- Symmetry 5y agoApple hasn't seemed interested historically. And the Nuvia folks left Apple to found their company explicitly because they thought an M1 style CPU core would do well in servers but Apple wasn't interested in doing that.
- mushufasa 5y agoit's not that apple will sell server chips. it's that developers can locally work on arm which makes it easier to deploy to severs. linus torvalds had a quote about this...
- Symmetry 5y agoAh, ok, that makes sense.
- gregsadetsky 5y agoLinus' quote/post: """ And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on". """ (emphasis in original) https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpost... Thanks, I did not know about this!
- jamesfmilne 5y agoApple have been hiring for Kubernetes and related roles. This may well be for their own devops for Apple services. However I'd be amazed if they don't release some kind of managed service for running Swift code in the cloud. Caveat emptor, though.
- jacques_chester 5y agoI have a similar view of what Apple are up to. Too many high-profile hires to be purely toiling in the mines.
- ageyfman 5y agothis is inevitable.
- k__ 5y agoMy operating systems teacher 2001 was a total RISC fan and always said it would eventually overtake CISC. I guess, he didn't expect this to take well after his retirement.
- zamadatix 5y agoARM today is probably more CISCy than what he considered CISC in 2001.
- monocasa 5y agoEh, it has a lot of instructions, but that was only the surface of RISC. It's a deeper design philosophy than that.
- floatboth 5y agoAArch64 is load-store + fixed-instruction-length, which is basically what "RISC" has come to mean in the modern day. X86 in 2001 was already… not that :)
- k__ 5y agoI always understood it as that too.
- lofi_lory 5y agoAlso, isn't x86 ISA just a translation layer today? I thought on the metal, there is a RISC like architecture these days anyway.
- nonameiguess 5y agoIn most cases, yes, but it doesn't get rid of the complexity for compiler backends that can't directly target the real instruction sets Intel uses and have to target the compatibility shim layer instead.
- ericbarrett 5y agoI nominate Amazon for this award. As mentioned in another comment here, ~50% of newly allocated EC2 instances are ARM.
- eqvinox 5y agoFunnily coincident timing: current post #2 (GCC 11.1 released) adds support for the CPUs mentioned here (currently post #4): AArch64 & arm A number of new CPUs are supported through arguments to the -mcpu and -mtune options in both the arm and aarch64 backends (GCC identifiers in parentheses): Arm Cortex-A78 (cortex-a78). Arm Cortex-A78AE (cortex-a78ae). Arm Cortex-A78C (cortex-a78c). Arm Cortex-X1 (cortex-x1). Arm Neoverse V1 (neoverse-v1). Arm Neoverse N2 (neoverse-n2). Good to see work going into this at the proper times. (Not that that was much of a problem for CPU cores in recent times. Still not a matter of course though.)
- floatboth 5y agoThese tunings will only be used if you compile stuff yourself with -march=native (or specifying one particular model). Most software out there would be compiled with generic non-tuned optimizations. The tuning is rarely a huge deal though.
- sitkack 5y agoThat is not entirely true. Binaries in the packaging systems might not be compiled for the most recent atomic instructions which can really affect performance. https://blog.dbi-services.com/aws-postgresql-on-graviton2-aarch64/ https://blog.dbi-services.com/aws-postgresql-on-graviton2-aa... https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/488 https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/488 We are about 9-14 months away from the right pieces making their way through the software ecosystems where this will be almost a non-issue. Exciting times for everyone!
- floatboth 5y agoWell, that – yeah. But it doesn't strictly have anything to do with the actual CPU model specific tuning that the news was about, only in that setting a specific CPU in -march (-mtune would not do it!) would imply the features. Typically though you'd just do -march=armv8-a+the+desired+features for that like the first post you linked does. Really the important piece for making distribution binaries not suck is ifuncs/multiversioning. But library and app authors currently are required to deliberately use them. Which is fine for manual optimizations that use intrinsics or assembly (and e.g. standard library atomics) but I'm not sure any compiler currently would automatically just do that for autovectorization.
- simondotau 5y agoYou can tell it's a modern CPU because its name matches the [A-Z][0-9] pattern.
- simondotau 5y agoThat was a joke by the way. Sorry that I'm the only one who thought it was funny.
- ykl 5y agoI thought it was funny!
- simondotau 5y agoHigh five, there are two of us!
- saagarjha 5y agoAs opposed to those old [a-z][0-9] CPUs that Intel puts out ;)
- truth_seeker 5y agoHah. I like it when I can enjoy my hammock instead of fine tuning my code to weird limits for performance. DDR5,PCIE 5.0, SVE speedup and 40% IPC improvement put a big smile on my face.
- klelatti 5y ago> AWS Graviton2-based EC2 Instances make up 14% of the installed base within AWS > 49% of AWS EC2 instance additions in 2020 are based on Graviton2 Surprised at this level of Graviton2 adoption in AWS at this stage. Any clues as to who is using these instances? Edit: Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.
- speedgoose 5y agoAWS itself is probably the main user I would guess. So you use them indirectly through AWS' vendor lock APIs.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 5y agoRDS support Graviton2 as the instance type, maybe people with supported versions just migrated.
- eqvinox 5y ago"instance additions" also doesn't take instance size/performance into account. If ARM-based instances are overall smaller, that'd allow more of them, distorting the numbers... Percentage of compute power would be cool to know here.
- somethingwitty1 5y agoThere have been a bunch of higher-profile, "we moved to Graviton2 and cut costs". Twitter, for example, migrated: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/twitter-selects-aws-and-graviton-arm-instances-to-serve-timelines/ https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/twitter-selects-aws-and...
- neuronexmachina 5y agoAlso Netflix, although I don't think they've said what portion of their instances they've migrated: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/customers/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/customers/
- KuiN 5y ago
- mwcampbell 5y agoI hope that ARM servers with reasonable specs won't be exclusive to AWS and the other hyperscalers. For example, it would be nice if OVH would offer ARM-based dedicated servers.
- MangoCoffee 5y agothis is good. if ARM take off for consumers and business. i'm hoping RISC-V will get some traction. there are alternative to Intel's x86.
- potlee 5y agoI wonder why they didn't use AWS wide numbers rather then just EC2. I would have thought EC2 would lag in the transition while AWS services would make the switch quickly
- dogma1138 5y agoBecause EC2 represents a more realistic market adoption, it’s more important to know if you can run the software of your choice on ARM than can Amazon develop a service on an ARM stack.
- ksec 5y agoTl;dr V1 = Slightly tweaked ARM Cortex X1 with SVE ( Used on Snapdragon 888 ) on 7nm aiming at ~4W per Core. N2 = New Cortex with AMRv9, ~40% IPC improvement over N1 or 10% lower than V1, SVE2, 5nm aiming at ~2W per Core. With Similar die size to N1. ( I fully expect Amazon to go 128 Core with their N2 Graviton ) So in case anyone is wondering, no, it is not Apple M1 level. Not anywhere close. CMN-700 = More Cores and support of Memory partitioning, important for VMs.
- paulpan 5y agoNice TLDR! It's apples and oranges comparison to Apple M1 chips (server vs. consumer) but does hint at what's possible with the next generation ARM Cortex "X2" cores, that could appear in next year's flagship smartphones and laptops. A 30-40% IPC jump, partly due to moving to 5nm fabrication process, is huge. Given the right implementation, namely squeezing more big cores than the current 1-3-4 configuration, it could close the gap considerably with Apple.
- plekter 5y agoProcess node changes generally doesn't do anything for IPC - those are generally rather due to microarchitecture improvements, so I doubt the move to 5nm has anything to do with the IPC gain..?
- wmf 5y agoThe node shrink lets you afford more transistors that provide more IPC.
- plekter 5y agoI agree with that - but if you take an unchanged core and manufacture it at a different node, then you won't see a change in IPC, which in my book makes it questionable to attribute IPC gains to the process node.
- andrewcchen 5y ago
- up6w6 5y agoDoes anyone know if these processors make mobile development easier ? I mean, its the same architecture now, right ? The only thing I could find is https://www.genymotion.com/blog/just-launched-arm-native-android-in-the-cloud-environment-on-aws/ https://www.genymotion.com/blog/just-launched-arm-native-and...