25 ms·

I realize it's probably targeted at hyperscale "cloud" stuff, but when their previous CPU was announced, I took a good long and hard look at what it would take

I realize it's probably targeted at hyperscale "cloud" stuff, but when their previous CPU was announced, I took a good long and hard look at what it would take to actually buy and use it. Unlike being able to buy a $650 Supermicro, MSI or Tyan dual socket motherboard and put your choice of a couple of Intel or AMD CPUs on it, it turned out that it was unavailable for mere mortals to purchase at any reasonable price. My message for people trying to make "ARM Server" CPUs a thing is that you have a real chicken or egg problem to solve, getting these things into the hands of people doing Linux development on x86-64 right now. Without a robust ecosystem of all the Taiwan-based motherboard manufacturers behind you, it's never going to get more than a few percent market share.

mcqueenjordan 5y ago
Same. I'd love to throw together one or two 1U servers with an Ampere chip, but I could not find a single way to buy one.
- walrus01 5y ago
  This is exactly the same thing that happened several years prior to Ampere, with other "ARM Server" CPU vendor offerings. I thing it turned out that the only thing I could purchase was a $3000 cpu and motherboard kit that were significantly slower and weaker than a $350 core i7 on a $120 motherboard (at the time, this was at least 3.5 to 4 years ago).
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
I think you mistake marketshare with mindshare. The devs can play with Raspberry Pies or similar, because why not, it runs AARCH64, don't it? The few devs who really need deep system level access are either paid, or get devkits. Meanwhile, 'the market' IS the hyperscalers. Nobody cares about the few nerds wetting themselves. They can go gaming, obsess over retrocomputing, toolkits, theming, /r/unixporn, whatever.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  I do think getting it in the hand of more people, more people will run it and say "yes, works" and then take it into consideration when making architecture/purchasing decisions. I've been a CTO for a decade+ and did try to get one the last time they made a splash.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    That could be remedied by giving affordable or even free evalution accesss in 'the cloud'.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >Nobody cares about the few nerds wetting themselves. They can go gaming, obsess over retrocomputing, toolkits, theming, /r/unixporn, whatever. The problem with this stance is that they can also keep using the non elitist platform, considering the elitist platform is inferior for many use cases.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    And thereby banging rocks against each other into eternity. No sparks...
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Nerd mindshare eventually converts to some marketshare. Adobe has been lax on their enforcement of their software among non-professional market segments for this exact reason.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- petre 5y ago
  Remember alpha and sparc? Their parent companies targeted the enterprise market as well.
- tomc1985 5y ago
Quequau 5y ago
Years ago I read an interview with one of Intel's upper managers for the Itanium product line and when he listed off the various reasons it was not successful the top of the list was the lack of availability to those people actually doing the work of Linux & compiler development having very expensive and unplanned consequences.
- sharpneli 5y ago
  Reminds me of the AMD ARM server boards, that happened way after Itanium and they still repeated the exact same mistake. Basically there was no way of getting your hands on them. They were interested only in "Serious customers".
  - Quequau 5y ago
    I presume that the performance segment that Itanium was intended for is Intel's most profitable. So everyone who proposes to make server chips targets that segment, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Having seen this play out a number of times I don't think targetting that segment and only that segment is a great idea.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I'm convinced sales forecasters don't actually understand how software ecosystems work. From a stack perspective, you can't really go it alone anymore. The total necessary software universe is too large to rebuild on a reasonable timescale, and too expensive to rebuild by oneself. IBM is about the smallest scale that can do this -- and even they're leveraging decades of effort.
      - oblio 5y ago
        IBM and Apple. Which makes Apple's Big Brother ad even funnier.
      - dralley 5y ago
        Although IBM is doing it x2, with s390x and also with POWER.
p2t2p 5y ago
In the end of the day it will be Apple disrupting x86 on servers. I already can run all my work related stuff natively on M1. There’s JDK, Node is here as well, ones lots of devs have M1 on their desktops it will only make sense to run aarch64 on servers as well.
- matwood 5y ago
  > In the end of the day it will be Apple disrupting x86 on servers. Apple made it happen on the client, but Amazon is making it happen on the server. The people who want to run their own DCs or hardware will end up part of the niche left on x86. I don't see Apple doing anything in the server space beyond providing minis like they do now.
  - PixelOfDeath 5y ago
    iServer with 64 cores and 128 GiB DDR4 for only $ 399,999.95 iServer with 64 cores and 256 GiB DDR4 for only $ 699,999.95
    - hestefisk 5y ago
      Remember Xscale, anyone?
      - geerlingguy 5y ago
        Xserve
        hestefisk 5y ago
        Sorry you are right. Xscale was an Intel cpu :)
        Krustopolis 5y ago
        And one with an ARM instruction set at that!
DoomHotel 5y ago
RISC-V International's plan to give away 1,000 boards to developers seems like a good idea. I like some of the products I've seen but the cheap ones are just toys and the decent ones are way overpriced.
- carlhjerpe 5y ago
  I hope those 1k boards end up in the right peoples hands, they could make all the difference or none of the difference depending on who gets them.
  - ticviking 5y ago
    Anecdotally, a guy in the Fedora project took a chance on giving a free OLPC laptop to a random education student in the middle of nowhere Utah. We met at a Panda Express in a strip mall. He helped me with some random problems I had on my ubuntu laptop and gave me a list of good resources to learn python. I never did deliver for the OLPC project, but I tested a lot of things other people were working on. I also finally grokked the free software idea and became and engineer instead of a history teacher. The $250 or so of prototype hardware has been repaid in testing, bug reporting other things I was able to do then. It sits on a shelf in my office to remind me how I got started, and what it mean to really be a part of a community that takes risks to invest in newcomers.
    - chokeartist 5y ago
      That's a very neat story. I have always loved the idea of paying things forward - investing in things or people in which you yourself do not see the direct return. Thanks for sharing.
    - geodel 5y ago
      Such a beautiful story!
maven29 5y ago
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefiacpi-firmware-aims-to-make-the-board-sbbr-compliant/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefia... Once Raspberry Pi CM4 support is added, I assume that you would be able to work on drivers for PCIe devices as well. Besides, non-server vendors like NXP have released official boards with ARM ServerReady support.
vngzs 5y ago
You can get ARM desktops now at non-crazy prices. The neat thing about them is they are 32/48 core CPUs at consumer-available prices[0]. Sure, they're on the high end, but it's around the cost of a workstation that one might use for, e.g., kernel development. I'm not affiliated with Avantek in any way. I just did a bunch of research looking to build/buy a desktop, and ARM was a contender, but I ended up building a beefy x86 machine with a Ryzen instead. [0]: https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html
- raesene9 5y ago
  At $2818 for the barebones, I think they've got some work to do yet to be affordable for hobbyists, but nice to see some progress :)
fbn79 5y ago
I remember and interesting speech by Linus Torvalds about success of x86 and why is hard for AMD to break into servers that I think can be relevanto for Ampere too: "I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won’t be all that stable. Or successful. Some people think that “the cloud” means that the instruction set doesn’t matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That’s bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you’re going to want to deploy on x86, because you’ll be able to run what you test “at home” (and by “at home” I don’t mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). Which means that you’ll happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better… Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which means that they’ll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff). Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over. (All emphasis original)"
- TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. Many customers are working at a level of abstraction where this objection is not relevant. For example, if I'm building on Firebase with Cloud Functions I'm so far abstracted from the underlying hardware that these architecture specific issues are less important. Similarly, if I'm working in Django/Python on AWS RDS, using an ARM server for my EC2 instance might be an issue ... but moving my RDS Postgres instance onto ARM might not make a difference.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    It's that way, and you're 100% right, until you hit the corner case performance bug that you can't track down and you spend hours trying to track down why some performance counter is incrementing monotonically on one platform but not on the other. Or why some highly threaded code has great throughput on your development workstation but falls down in production and it probably has something to do with differences in lock behaviour, etc.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
All the cool kids have a closet full of Raspberry Pis running their next billion dollar idea.
api 5y ago
The high-end workstation and on-premise server markets overlap with the hyperscale cloud market. That's been true all along on X64 with high-end Xeon and Epyc parts. "Hyperscale cloud" is just buzzword for "huge data center somewhere else" so there's not much of a difference except packaging and power (machines for hyperscale data centers often take direct DC power, not AC into one PSU per machine.)
Twirrim 5y ago
Unlike POWER[1] and Itanium, you can very easily pick up ARM systems for experimenting with. That means there's way less of a burden to experimenting with new architecture. There's also ARM based Chromebooks and all sorts of devices, and you can also get ARM based servers for pennies per hour. ARM's dominance in the cell phone market means it is ample popular enough, got lots of eyes on it, and increasing amounts of software is picking up dedicated optimisations for it. I'm not sure what else you're really expecting. The hardware is there. The software is there. Very likely you could switch to ARM without noticing. [1] Last time I mentioned this to someone involved in POWER architecture, they told me there were going to be cheap POWER based systems coming out to meet the "home hackers" market. I'm not paying particularly close attention, but I haven't seen anything yet?
Veedrac 5y ago
It didn't seem to matter for Graviton2, TBH. ARM servers took off the moment they got fast enough to be worth converting software. https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1387061860965437440 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1387061860965437440
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Amazon made Graviton affordable. You even get a discount compared to running x86 instances. Pay-As-You-Go is great for trying out new architectures: it's easy to justify spinning a few instances to test whether something can work under ARM. And if it does then convert existing instances to save money. No (hard to get unless you are a large business) dev boards to purchase.
wmf 5y ago
https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstation.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstati... It's available but as you said, not at any reasonable price. The motherboard alone seems to be $5,000.
bogomipz 5y ago
Out of curiosity what was the price point? Was there a high minimum number of units required to place an order as well?
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
I feel like you think that theres only two markets: "hyperscale cloud stuff" and colocation. Sure, nobody can drop $1000 on an ARM server and stick in 1U at their local colo. Do you want to? Is that what is fun for you? Or is it more about physical ownership? When I first started developing on AWS, I bought the company a beefy server so we could run virtual machines on it to "test it locally". We bought a dual socket supermicro board and put our choice of Intel Xeons on it. It ended up being north of $2000 (ten+ years ago). At the time AWS c1.xlarge were $0.80 per hour. Paying per hour just felt wrong. And then, within a few months, we had a working system, and we were running 250 c1.xlarge for hours on end, and charging 50x for the end result. The $2000 machine sat idle and was a total waste of money. We developed on our local machines (a Mac), and deployed to test machines on AWS. Now I pay some hosting company $x per month to host my eldest's minecraft server. I don't want to manage that shit! I have money but not time, and I use my time effectively. That means I don't waste my time buying and configuring servers.
chrischen 5y ago
Most devs are using mac, and all future macs are now Arm. I deploy to linux and develop on such an ARM mac, and I’ve already converted pretty much all my toolchain to ARM. Now choosing ARM is just a matter of telling Docker buildx to build for ARM.

mcqueenjordan 5y ago

Same. I'd love to throw together one or two 1U servers with an Ampere chip, but I could not find a single way to buy one.

walrus01 5y ago
This is exactly the same thing that happened several years prior to Ampere, with other "ARM Server" CPU vendor offerings. I thing it turned out that the only thing I could purchase was a $3000 cpu and motherboard kit that were significantly slower and weaker than a $350 core i7 on a $120 motherboard (at the time, this was at least 3.5 to 4 years ago).

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

I think you mistake marketshare with mindshare. The devs can play with Raspberry Pies or similar, because why not, it runs AARCH64, don't it? The few devs who really need deep system level access are either paid, or get devkits. Meanwhile, 'the market' IS the hyperscalers. Nobody cares about the few nerds wetting themselves. They can go gaming, obsess over retrocomputing, toolkits, theming, /r/unixporn, whatever.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
I do think getting it in the hand of more people, more people will run it and say "yes, works" and then take it into consideration when making architecture/purchasing decisions. I've been a CTO for a decade+ and did try to get one the last time they made a splash.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  That could be remedied by giving affordable or even free evalution accesss in 'the cloud'.
imtringued 5y ago
>Nobody cares about the few nerds wetting themselves. They can go gaming, obsess over retrocomputing, toolkits, theming, /r/unixporn, whatever. The problem with this stance is that they can also keep using the non elitist platform, considering the elitist platform is inferior for many use cases.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  And thereby banging rocks against each other into eternity. No sparks...
selfhoster11 5y ago
Nerd mindshare eventually converts to some marketshare. Adobe has been lax on their enforcement of their software among non-professional market segments for this exact reason.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
petre 5y ago
Remember alpha and sparc? Their parent companies targeted the enterprise market as well.
tomc1985 5y ago

Quequau 5y ago

Years ago I read an interview with one of Intel's upper managers for the Itanium product line and when he listed off the various reasons it was not successful the top of the list was the lack of availability to those people actually doing the work of Linux & compiler development having very expensive and unplanned consequences.

sharpneli 5y ago
Reminds me of the AMD ARM server boards, that happened way after Itanium and they still repeated the exact same mistake. Basically there was no way of getting your hands on them. They were interested only in "Serious customers".
- Quequau 5y ago
  I presume that the performance segment that Itanium was intended for is Intel's most profitable. So everyone who proposes to make server chips targets that segment, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Having seen this play out a number of times I don't think targetting that segment and only that segment is a great idea.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I'm convinced sales forecasters don't actually understand how software ecosystems work. From a stack perspective, you can't really go it alone anymore. The total necessary software universe is too large to rebuild on a reasonable timescale, and too expensive to rebuild by oneself. IBM is about the smallest scale that can do this -- and even they're leveraging decades of effort.
    - oblio 5y ago
      IBM and Apple. Which makes Apple's Big Brother ad even funnier.
    - dralley 5y ago
      Although IBM is doing it x2, with s390x and also with POWER.

p2t2p 5y ago

In the end of the day it will be Apple disrupting x86 on servers. I already can run all my work related stuff natively on M1. There’s JDK, Node is here as well, ones lots of devs have M1 on their desktops it will only make sense to run aarch64 on servers as well.

matwood 5y ago
> In the end of the day it will be Apple disrupting x86 on servers. Apple made it happen on the client, but Amazon is making it happen on the server. The people who want to run their own DCs or hardware will end up part of the niche left on x86. I don't see Apple doing anything in the server space beyond providing minis like they do now.
- PixelOfDeath 5y ago
  iServer with 64 cores and 128 GiB DDR4 for only $ 399,999.95 iServer with 64 cores and 256 GiB DDR4 for only $ 699,999.95
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    Remember Xscale, anyone?
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      Xserve
      - hestefisk 5y ago
        Sorry you are right. Xscale was an Intel cpu :)
        Krustopolis 5y ago
        And one with an ARM instruction set at that!

DoomHotel 5y ago

RISC-V International's plan to give away 1,000 boards to developers seems like a good idea. I like some of the products I've seen but the cheap ones are just toys and the decent ones are way overpriced.

carlhjerpe 5y ago
I hope those 1k boards end up in the right peoples hands, they could make all the difference or none of the difference depending on who gets them.
- ticviking 5y ago
  Anecdotally, a guy in the Fedora project took a chance on giving a free OLPC laptop to a random education student in the middle of nowhere Utah. We met at a Panda Express in a strip mall. He helped me with some random problems I had on my ubuntu laptop and gave me a list of good resources to learn python. I never did deliver for the OLPC project, but I tested a lot of things other people were working on. I also finally grokked the free software idea and became and engineer instead of a history teacher. The $250 or so of prototype hardware has been repaid in testing, bug reporting other things I was able to do then. It sits on a shelf in my office to remind me how I got started, and what it mean to really be a part of a community that takes risks to invest in newcomers.
  - chokeartist 5y ago
    That's a very neat story. I have always loved the idea of paying things forward - investing in things or people in which you yourself do not see the direct return. Thanks for sharing.
  - geodel 5y ago
    Such a beautiful story!

maven29 5y ago

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefiacpi-firmware-aims-to-make-the-board-sbbr-compliant/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefia... Once Raspberry Pi CM4 support is added, I assume that you would be able to work on drivers for PCIe devices as well. Besides, non-server vendors like NXP have released official boards with ARM ServerReady support.

vngzs 5y ago

You can get ARM desktops now at non-crazy prices. The neat thing about them is they are 32/48 core CPUs at consumer-available prices[0]. Sure, they're on the high end, but it's around the cost of a workstation that one might use for, e.g., kernel development. I'm not affiliated with Avantek in any way. I just did a bunch of research looking to build/buy a desktop, and ARM was a contender, but I ended up building a beefy x86 machine with a Ryzen instead. [0]: https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html

raesene9 5y ago
At $2818 for the barebones, I think they've got some work to do yet to be affordable for hobbyists, but nice to see some progress :)

fbn79 5y ago

I remember and interesting speech by Linus Torvalds about success of x86 and why is hard for AMD to break into servers that I think can be relevanto for Ampere too: "I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won’t be all that stable. Or successful. Some people think that “the cloud” means that the instruction set doesn’t matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That’s bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you’re going to want to deploy on x86, because you’ll be able to run what you test “at home” (and by “at home” I don’t mean literally in your home, but in your work environment). Which means that you’ll happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better… Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which means that they’ll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff). Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over. (All emphasis original)"

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Many customers are working at a level of abstraction where this objection is not relevant. For example, if I'm building on Firebase with Cloud Functions I'm so far abstracted from the underlying hardware that these architecture specific issues are less important. Similarly, if I'm working in Django/Python on AWS RDS, using an ARM server for my EC2 instance might be an issue ... but moving my RDS Postgres instance onto ARM might not make a difference.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It's that way, and you're 100% right, until you hit the corner case performance bug that you can't track down and you spend hours trying to track down why some performance counter is incrementing monotonically on one platform but not on the other. Or why some highly threaded code has great throughput on your development workstation but falls down in production and it probably has something to do with differences in lock behaviour, etc.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

All the cool kids have a closet full of Raspberry Pis running their next billion dollar idea.

api 5y ago

The high-end workstation and on-premise server markets overlap with the hyperscale cloud market. That's been true all along on X64 with high-end Xeon and Epyc parts. "Hyperscale cloud" is just buzzword for "huge data center somewhere else" so there's not much of a difference except packaging and power (machines for hyperscale data centers often take direct DC power, not AC into one PSU per machine.)

Twirrim 5y ago

Unlike POWER[1] and Itanium, you can very easily pick up ARM systems for experimenting with. That means there's way less of a burden to experimenting with new architecture. There's also ARM based Chromebooks and all sorts of devices, and you can also get ARM based servers for pennies per hour. ARM's dominance in the cell phone market means it is ample popular enough, got lots of eyes on it, and increasing amounts of software is picking up dedicated optimisations for it. I'm not sure what else you're really expecting. The hardware is there. The software is there. Very likely you could switch to ARM without noticing. [1] Last time I mentioned this to someone involved in POWER architecture, they told me there were going to be cheap POWER based systems coming out to meet the "home hackers" market. I'm not paying particularly close attention, but I haven't seen anything yet?

Veedrac 5y ago

It didn't seem to matter for Graviton2, TBH. ARM servers took off the moment they got fast enough to be worth converting software. https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1387061860965437440 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1387061860965437440

908B64B197 5y ago
Amazon made Graviton affordable. You even get a discount compared to running x86 instances. Pay-As-You-Go is great for trying out new architectures: it's easy to justify spinning a few instances to test whether something can work under ARM. And if it does then convert existing instances to save money. No (hard to get unless you are a large business) dev boards to purchase.

wmf 5y ago

https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstation.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstati... It's available but as you said, not at any reasonable price. The motherboard alone seems to be $5,000.

bogomipz 5y ago

Out of curiosity what was the price point? Was there a high minimum number of units required to place an order as well?

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

I feel like you think that theres only two markets: "hyperscale cloud stuff" and colocation. Sure, nobody can drop $1000 on an ARM server and stick in 1U at their local colo. Do you want to? Is that what is fun for you? Or is it more about physical ownership? When I first started developing on AWS, I bought the company a beefy server so we could run virtual machines on it to "test it locally". We bought a dual socket supermicro board and put our choice of Intel Xeons on it. It ended up being north of $2000 (ten+ years ago). At the time AWS c1.xlarge were $0.80 per hour. Paying per hour just felt wrong. And then, within a few months, we had a working system, and we were running 250 c1.xlarge for hours on end, and charging 50x for the end result. The $2000 machine sat idle and was a total waste of money. We developed on our local machines (a Mac), and deployed to test machines on AWS. Now I pay some hosting company $x per month to host my eldest's minecraft server. I don't want to manage that shit! I have money but not time, and I use my time effectively. That means I don't waste my time buying and configuring servers.

chrischen 5y ago

Most devs are using mac, and all future macs are now Arm. I deploy to linux and develop on such an ARM mac, and I’ve already converted pretty much all my toolchain to ARM. Now choosing ARM is just a matter of telling Docker buildx to build for ARM.