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Bought myself an Ampere Altra system
- burnt-resistor 1y ago1341 PLN / 371 USD isn't "cheap" for 25% more cores. That's almost double the price. Q64-22 on eBay (US) for $150-200 USD / 542-723 PLN. https://www.ebay.com/itm/365380821650 https://www.ebay.com/itm/365380821650 https://www.ebay.com/itm/365572689742 https://www.ebay.com/itm/365572689742
- szszrk 1y agoHe clearly refers to that and states they did not respond. Also, CPU was hardly the biggest cost here.
- Aissen 1y ago25% more cores and 36% more clock. It amounts to paying 85% more for 70% more perf. Not too bad.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoGHz/MHz wars and ultra-deep pipelines lead to long pipeline stalls and low efficiency. Clock != (IPS) cycle efficiency. What matters is measured performance. There's little point in buying the most expensive option, it's usually throwing money away. Sometimes though, option are limited but there are also traditional and alternative channel vendors besides secondary markets. For example, a vendor or the mfgr might be willing to sample a part.
- Aissen 1y agoWhen comparing the same design, it absolutely makes sense, because it usually scales. Of course in this case, there's the SRAM which is shared, memory bandwidth, etc. As a rule of thumb: run your own benchmark!
- haerwu 1y agoThose auctions are where we looked at. No answer from seller - probably they did not wanted to deal with sending packages outside of USA.
- timzaman 1y agoOfftopic, I'm so confused why this is top1 on my HN? Just a pretty normal build?
- szszrk 1y agoNormal ARM64 80 core system with $1000 EATX motherboard? How is this typical?
- tinix 1y agoEATX is a pretty standard server motherboard form factor. It's not even a multiple CPU board... This is indeed a pretty standard (and weak) ARM server build. You can get the same CPU M128-30 with 128 3ghz cores for under $800 USD. You can throw two into a Gigabyte MP72-HB0 and fit it into a full tower case easily. That'd only cost like $3,200 USD for 256 cores. RAM is cheap, and that board could take 16 DIMMs. If you used 16 GB DIMM like OP that's only 256 GB of RAM, in a server, it is not that much... only one gig per core... for like $500 USD. Maybe for a personal build this seems extravagant but it's nothing special for a server.
- haerwu 1y agoDepends on how you look at it. Would you call Threadripper system "a normal build"? For many people they are normal builds because they need more computing power or more PCIe lanes than "normal user" desktop has. On the other side you have those who pretend to use raspberry/pi 3 as "an Arm desktop" despite only 1GB of ram and 4 sluggish cores.
- baq 1y agoI haven’t been following hardware for a while, granted, but this is the first time I see a desktop build with an arm64 cpu. Didn’t know you can just… buy one.
- szszrk 1y agoI guess this post proves you still can't :) Not that much changed since this: https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2019/10/23/what-is-wrong-with-all-those-aarch64-desktops/ https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2019/10/23/what-is-wrong-w...
- a_t48 1y agoA few years ago I was working at a place that needed to do builds targeting the Jetson platform, and was somewhat allergic to tossing it into the cloud due to cost. We ran the numbers and the Altra paid for itself pretty quickly. Great thing, it ripped through our C++ builds + Docker image creation - I think we ended up with a 64 core version (don't remember through who, but we needed a server form factor). Ended up still moving our release builds to the cloud, due to some dicey internet situations but for local builds this thing was A+. I hope they're still using it.
- dingdingdang 1y agoSounds good, but also sounds odd that a dicey internet situation caused you to move to the cloud as opposed to local (I guess could be dicey uplink for remote team or similar)
- fschutze 1y agoI never bought used computer parts. Are these parts generally reliable for ~2 years when bought used?
- mrheosuper 1y agothose are server-grade stuff, it's normal for them to work 10 years continuously.
- avhception 1y agoI regularly buy used hardware. It fails when it fails, same as the new stuff. Is there a higher probability? Possibly, but at the small sample sizes I'm at I can't feel the difference. Feels random either way.
- cornichon622 1y agoBuilt a gaming desktop for a friend almost 2 years ago; used GPU and CPU (maybe a few others things too), everything's going great. It helps that our local Cragslist offers efficient buyer protection. Server-side, I also bought used Xeons for an old box and recertified 10TB Exos. No issues there neither. The HDDs are a bit of a gamble, but for anything else I can only encourage you to buy used!
- throwaway2037 1y ago> It helps that our local Cragslist offers efficient buyer protection. What does this mean?
- cornichon622 1y agoWhen you buy something on Le Bon Coin, if it's not conform to the description or outright broken, you can very easily get a refund from the platform itself up to 3 days after reception, even if the seller disappeared. I think it encourages people to buy used stuff by removing the main drawback which is "it may not work properly anymore".
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- maz1b 1y agoI've always wondered why there isn't a bigger market / offering for dedicated servers with Ampere at their heart (apart from Hetzner) If anyone knows of any, let me know!
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoA lot of software is built and optimized for x86 and EPYC processors are really good so it is hard to get into arm, don’t think that many companies use it.
- zxexz 1y agoI don’t think a lot of companies realize they are using it. At three companies now, I’ve witnessed core microservices migrate to ARM seamlessly, due to engineering being direct pressure to “reduce cloud spend”. The terrifying (and amazing) bit is that moving to ARM was enough to get finance off engineering’s back in all cases.
- adev_ 1y ago> A lot of software is built and optimized for x86 and EPYC processors are really good so it is hard to get into arm, don’t think that many companies use it. That is just not true. Nowadays, most OSS software and most server side software will run without any hinch on armv8. A tremendous amount of work has been done to speed up common software on armv8, partially due to popularity of mobile as a platform but also and to the emergence of ARM servers (Graviton / Neoverses) in the major Cloud providers infrastructure.
- p_l 1y agoHowever, it's hard to get into ARM other than using cloud offerings. Because those cloud offerings have handled for you the problematic case of ARM generally operating as "closed platform" even when everything is open source. On a PC server, usually you only hit any issues if you want to play with something more exotic on either software or hardware. Bog-standard linux setup is trivial to integrate. On ARM, even though finally there's UEFI available, I recall that even few years ago there were issues with things like interrupt controller support - and that kind of reputation persists and definitely makes it harder to percolate on-prem ARM. It also does not help that you need to go for pretty pricy systems to avoid vendor lock-in at firmware compatibility level - or had to, until quite recently.
- fschutze 1y agoI realize the Ampere Altra Q features the Armv8.2-a ISA. Does anybody know if there are chips with Armv8.6-a (or above) or even SVE that one can buy? I did some research but couldn't find any.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nubinetwork 1y agoRadxa orion o6 claims to be the first arm v9 system available.
- haerwu 1y ago"claims" is very good summary In my previous post https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/06/20/the-hunt-for-a-development-machine/ https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/06/20/the-hunt-for-a-... I wrote: > There were “Arm V9” systems before it, so it was not “World’s First”. There were several blobs needed to run it, so it was not “Open Source”.
- adrian_b 1y agoArmv8.6-A is almost the same as Armv9.1-A, except that a few features are not mandatory. There have been no consumer chips with Armv9.1-A, but only with Armv9.0-A and with Armv9.2-A. The only CPU with Armv8.6-A that has ever been announced publicly was the now obsolete Neoverse N2. Neoverse N2 has been skipped by Amazon and I do not know if any other major cloud vendor has used it. So what you really search for are CPUs with Armv9.2-A (i.e. a superset of Armv8.6-A), i.e. with Cortex-A520 or Cortex-A720 or Cortex-X4 or Cortex-A725 or Cortex-X925. There are many smartphones launched last year or this year with these CPU cores, but except for them the list of choices is short, i.e. either the very cheap Radxa Orion O6 (Cortex-A720 based), which is fine, but its software is immature, or a very expensive NVIDIA DGX development system (Cortex-X925 based; $4000 from NVIDIA or $3000 from ASUS), or one of the latest Apple computers, which support Armv8.7-A (which do not have SVE, but which have SME). For the latest Qualcomm CPUs, I have no idea what ISA is supported by them, because Qualcomm always hides very deeply any technical information about their products. If all you care about is the CPU, then a mid-range Android smartphone in the $400-$500 price range could be a better development system, especially if its USB Type C connector supports USB 3.0 and DisplayPort, like some Motorola Edge models, allowing you to use an external monitor and a docking station. If you also care about testing together with some standard desktop/server peripherals, the mini-ITX motherboard of Radxa Orion O6 is more appropriate, but encountering bugs in some of its Linux device drivers is likely, which may slow down the development until they are handled.
- dwaaa 1y ago[flagged]
- amelius 1y ago> And the latest one, an Apple MacBook Pro, is nice and fast but has some limits — does not support 64k page size. Which I need for my work. I wonder where this requirement comes from ...
- ot 1y agoI would guess to develop and test software that will ultimately run on a system with 64k page size.
- amelius 1y agoIs there a fundamental advantage over other page sizes, other than the convenience of 64k == 2^16?
- ch_123 1y ago64k is the largest page size that the ARM architecture supports. The large page size provides advantages for applications which allocate large amounts of memory.
- raverbashing 1y agoYes there are (as a starting point 4k is a "page size for ants" in 2025 - 4MB might be too much however) But the bigger the page the less TLB entries you need, and less entries in your OS data structures managing memory, etc
- fc417fc802 1y ago4K seems appropriate for embedded applications. Meanwhile 4M seems like it would be plenty small for my desktop. Nearly every process is currently using more than that. Even the lightest is still coming in at a bit over 1M
- p_ing 1y ago1M is a huge waste of memory. Imagine writing out a one sentence note in notepad and the resulting file being 1M on disk.
- bayindirh 1y agoI think the best thing happened to that system is having an Arctic Cooling device on board. These things are as reliable as it gets. None of the Arctic Cooling fans I had ever failed or lost performance over the years. Even their first generation desktop fan (Breeze) which runs multiple 8-12 hour shifts with me for the last decade shows any age.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- haerwu 1y agoOK, I tend to ignore HN but got link to this post from several people so will go and comment.