5 ms·
To be fair the Neoverse N-series was designed for datacenter style usage where lower clock frequencies and going wide is more common even on x86. For client use
by aseipp 3y ago
To be fair the Neoverse N-series was designed for datacenter style usage where lower clock frequencies and going wide is more common even on x86. For client uses some of the things the Apple M-series does for single core performance may or may not be worse; in particular 128-bit cache lines would potentially add a lot more false-sharing, and the really big-and-fast per-core L2 is probably not practical even if you added the 16kb page size that Apple uses to achieve it (L2 sizes it didn't get any better with AmpereOne either, though). Those are big, good single-core wins that make sense for client SKUs. I think you'll always have some of those tradeoffs with CPUs like this.
Hopefully Qualcomm Oryon will spice things up on the client side a bit. Maybe we can get some real HEDT designs after that.
- ihattendorf 3y agoThat's all true, but then maybe it's not "the fastest Arm desktop" if it's 25% faster in multi-core workload but the M2 Ultra is _168% faster in single core_ (that's 168% faster as in 2.68x as fast, not 68% faster). There are plenty of workloads where the M2 Ultra will be significantly more performant. I'm excited for the future of ARM desktops, but that also means they need to significantly increase single core performance. It looks like maybe the Snapdragon X Elite will get us there? Or at least significantly closer.
- geerlingguy 3y agoAmpereOne uses a customized CPU core too, and I haven't had a chance to test on it yet to see how it compares. Still probably far below the latest Qualcomm or Apple core designs, but should be better than the Altra/Altra Max series. I would love to see an EPYC-style Arm CPU with M1 or better cores.