3 ms·

I’d love to see a cluster of M2 SOCs placed together on a single PCB with built in networking. Maybe direct PCIe to PCIe communication between the SOCs in a hyp

I’d love to see a cluster of M2 SOCs placed together on a single PCB with built in networking. Maybe direct PCIe to PCIe communication between the SOCs in a hypercube topology. Having multiple CPUs spread out around the box will help with cooling which is my limiting factor for power density. My tasks are data parallel and CPU bound with low ram and disk requirements. I could probably design such a PCB myself but the cost of doing so will unlikely be paid back unless my compute needs go up by another order of magnitude. I am many years away from that being viable. For now I’m sticking to AMD chips. Unless someone else wants this as well for which I could amortize the costs.

moondev 4y ago
It would seem this devkit is even more ideal for you? 80 cores and buy as little memory as you want. Not to mention it does not need clustering and runs any aarch64 distro of your choosing
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I checked out the benchmarks and it seems that the 80 core version would be ~6.5x M2 and would indeed be cheaper on the assumption that the only way to get M2 chips is to first buy a Mac. But if (an I know it isn’t going to happen) M2 was at the Jetson Nano price of $150 then it starts to become attractive again. It’s 2.3x faster than Ryzen 7900X, I’m not sure if the dev kit has a price performance advantage over that and I’ve seen the Ampere Altra chips on their own for much more so I’m thinking the dev kit has a discount which probably comes with a purchase limit.
  - joespeed 4y ago
    The dev kit has no purchase limit. Same is true for the dev platform workstation 32, 64, 80, 128 core (and a 96 faster cores option if you ask nicely). https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-64-core-arm-workstation-runs-windows https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-64-core-arm-worksta... For those keeping score the Ampere Altra 128 core 3GHz Supermicro telco edge server being used in 5G base stations benchmarks equal to 100 RPi4 and 22% more energy efficient. https://youtu.be/UT5UbSJOyog https://youtu.be/UT5UbSJOyog
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      Interesting, when I first saw these chips my thought was Epic performance for Epic prices, now it looks like 2x Ryzen performance for 2x the price. Which is a huge improvement, I could save on the other ancillary costs of putting together a computer so it could probably be quite cost effective overall. I think I’m just outside of the target market for these chips, my workloads are in bursts so power consumption isn’t a big deal for me. Given that it’s a big deal for others I would expect Ampere Altra to price their chips to a point to go after that market which makes total economic sense. It’s generally not good business to target cheapskates like myself. I do love the chips though.

moondev 4y ago

It would seem this devkit is even more ideal for you? 80 cores and buy as little memory as you want. Not to mention it does not need clustering and runs any aarch64 distro of your choosing

cjbgkagh 4y ago
I checked out the benchmarks and it seems that the 80 core version would be ~6.5x M2 and would indeed be cheaper on the assumption that the only way to get M2 chips is to first buy a Mac. But if (an I know it isn’t going to happen) M2 was at the Jetson Nano price of $150 then it starts to become attractive again. It’s 2.3x faster than Ryzen 7900X, I’m not sure if the dev kit has a price performance advantage over that and I’ve seen the Ampere Altra chips on their own for much more so I’m thinking the dev kit has a discount which probably comes with a purchase limit.
- joespeed 4y ago
  The dev kit has no purchase limit. Same is true for the dev platform workstation 32, 64, 80, 128 core (and a 96 faster cores option if you ask nicely). https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-64-core-arm-workstation-runs-windows https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-64-core-arm-worksta... For those keeping score the Ampere Altra 128 core 3GHz Supermicro telco edge server being used in 5G base stations benchmarks equal to 100 RPi4 and 22% more energy efficient. https://youtu.be/UT5UbSJOyog https://youtu.be/UT5UbSJOyog
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Interesting, when I first saw these chips my thought was Epic performance for Epic prices, now it looks like 2x Ryzen performance for 2x the price. Which is a huge improvement, I could save on the other ancillary costs of putting together a computer so it could probably be quite cost effective overall. I think I’m just outside of the target market for these chips, my workloads are in bursts so power consumption isn’t a big deal for me. Given that it’s a big deal for others I would expect Ampere Altra to price their chips to a point to go after that market which makes total economic sense. It’s generally not good business to target cheapskates like myself. I do love the chips though.