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AMD reveals its first ARM processor: 8-core Opteron A1100
- jjoe 13y agoSo excited about the prospects but I just can't get past this sentence: Rounding out the SoCs, they'll also include dedicated engines for cryptography and compression. "They" have ruined it for me...
- dmm 13y agoForgive me if I'm being dense but what harm would embedded crypto and compression engines do? You don't have to use them right?
- fleitz 13y agoThere's little room for tampering with crypto, the only room is for tampering with the RNGs. As far as I know all crypto algorithms are deterministic based on the key/IV and the data.
- djcapelis 13y agoWhile that's true and required to successfully decrypt most algorithms, it is also true that there are more types of tampering one can do than changing the output ciphertext. Usually involving storing the key or leaking data somehow.
- shuzchen 13y agoAssuming they've already compromised the crypto bits of the chip there's nothing to gain in avoiding them since the non-crypto bits could just as well have the same compromises. Might as well just take the time/energy savings. Tampering with the RNG probably provides the best value for an attacker, and is harder to detect.
- rpledge 13y agoThese aren't unusual features in SoCs. Of course if you're concerned about backdoors you don't have to invoke these engines, at least with a software implementation you can control the implementation.
- thomasjames 13y agoThat is a pretty great thing, as far as I am concerned. Custom ASICs for routine server tasks that would otherwise clog up a general purpose core? I'll take it.
- jevinskie 13y agoAt this point, hardware crypto engines are a "must have" feature for many purchasers. Their desire for performance outweighs concerns about malicious actors backdooring the crypto engine. And if the crypto engine is compromised, how little/great of a leap is it to believe there is microcode to backdoor a general OS or crypto library?
- quackerhacker 13y agoI gotta give AMD massive credit...while I have mainly used intel in my setups, AMD has really pushed their offerings. First I remember everyone driving the price up of an AMD video card just because bitcoin mining. Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware. Now an Arm 8-core CPU...although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming, still AMD's pricing would entice me to buy 2 for the price of 1 Intel i7
- ekianjo 13y ago> Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware. Does not mean much. Their APU used in these consoles is very weak compared to what we have in mid to high end PC graphics cards. They were obviously chosen for their price there, not for the performance (which is MEH at best).
- corresation 13y agoIt's approximately equal to a 7870 (the PS3 variant), which is anything but "weak". Indeed, it's what's in my play PC, and plays any current game with ease. As to AMD generally, well they have by far the leading compute cards, and hold their own in the high end, so certainly not "meh".
- ekianjo 13y agoWell the performance on 1080p games has been less than stellar so far, compared to my gaming PC. Laughable, even, since my PC graphics card is already almost 2 years old. These consoles are really a joke, and they are making money on the hardware this time around, that tells you how cheap they are.
- lotso 13y agoThe games at launch are always notoriously not representative of the full capabilities of the console. Compare any game from the launch of the previous generation to games that are being released now. There is a huge difference. Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money. I'm sure they aren't as huge loss leaders as they were in the past, but I'd be surprised to know if they are making money on them. If Microsoft could cut the MSRP, they would have.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- fleitz 13y agoThis may be a much bigger threat to intel than AMD64 was.
- skylan_q 13y agoISAs eat the market from the bottom-up. x86 is at risk here.
- fleitz 13y agoEspecially with AMDs ability to throw GPU hardware on the CPU. ARM eats the bottom end on a $/Watt model, and the GPU eats the top end on a raw performance model.
- hhw 13y agoIn order to take significant market share, AMD will either need to offer superior price/performance and/or superior performance/watt. Both are unlikely because at 28nm, by the time the A1100 hits the market it will effectively be two manufacturing processes behind Intel's 14nm. Manufacturing process size makes a big difference in production costs, as well as in power efficiency. The microarchitecture won't even be a factor with that great a disparity.
- rodgerd 13y agoThat's an... odd perspective. AMD64 was a huge threat to Intel. It dominated the then flagship P4 and completely destroyed Intel's attempt to force us into an "Itanium everywhere" future. The fact it didn't leave AMD in charge of the x86-compatible market owes more to their superb Israeli chip design team being able to pull them out of the frying pan.
- protomyth 13y agoConsidering AMD64 took down the Itanium and basically defined the industry, it has a ways to go and Intel's response to AMD64 might be instructive.
- rayiner 13y agoI don't see AMD's play here. What value do they add with a processor that they don't design, don't fab, and can't produce in the kind of volume tablet and phone chips get produced?
- gnoway 13y agoI don't understand your comment. "Doesn't design and doesn't fab" describes every ARM licensee. Also, this chip isn't going anywhere near phones or tablets. Did you look at the specifications?
- rayiner 13y agoThe other ARM licensees have a hook: Qualcomm integrates with its LTE base bands, Apple builds a phone around it, etc. The phone/tablet angle is important because the high volumes in those markets help justify big design teams at Qualcomm and Apple.
- zik 13y agoARM designs the "IP core" of the processor but doesn't fab anything themselves. AMD brings their own SOC design and fab process.
- rayiner 13y agoAMD is fabless, so what they bring is an SOC design. But what can they offer in an SOC other companies can't? I guess Hypertransport?
- msoad 13y agoI don't know anything about chips. But I know ARM architecture was around for decades. Why it's hot again? I get the point for using it in smartphones and tablets, but why should servers use ARM?
- shornlacuna 13y agoSuperior performance per watt.
- klodolph 13y agoThere are three metrics getting thrown around: * Performance per dollar operating cost (performance per watt is closest to this) * Performance per dollar capital expenditure (important for desktop systems, where operating costs are low) * Performance per dollar TCO (sum of the above two) The third one is the important one.
- jeffdavis 13y agoGood summary, but after reading this thread I'm still confused. Why ARM? How does the ISA impact the aforementioned criteria? Why would a phones demand a different ISA?
- gaius 13y agoBecause everything today is about the heat generated by computation. In a phone, it wastes the battery and is unpleasant for the user. In the datacentre, heat determines how much computation you can do in the volume of space you have, and how much you have to spend on cooling systems (the running of which is expensive too). So datacentre operators that already have a building are facing a choice: get a new building, or make better use of the one they have. ARM cores are typically slower in absolute terms than Intel cores, but at a given level of power, you can run more of them.
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoThe original choice of ARM for mobile and x86 for desktop is basically a historical accident. The differences between modern ARM cpus and modern x86 have less to do with the ISA itself and more to do with the way ARM cpus have been designed to be low-power for decades and have worked their way up the performance scale, while x86 has been designed for performance and has only lately been emphasizing low power. These lead to different design points.
- userbinator 13y agoI think reusing the Opteron name is really not a good idea, since now there'll be x86 Opterons and ARM Opterons. Maybe Apteron would've been a better choice...
- skylan_q 13y agoI agree it could be a point of confusion, but anyone buying an Opteron would probably be looking at the CPU specs anyways.
- bostonpete 13y agoHow about "Opterarm"? :-)
- GarrettBeck 13y agoI have a feeling history is going to repeat itself. Statements like "AMD believes that it will be the leader of this ARM Server market" reminds me of the DRAM boom-and-bust from 2006-2009. The new (old) hot technology froths the market into a frenzy and semiconductor fabs start rushing to get a slice of the action. Does Qimonda ring a bell to anyone?
- elipsey 13y agoIt's a relief that AMD has a performance/watt alternative to bulldozer. I sure hope they can keep being a business so I have someone to buy hardware from that doesn't fuse off features to screw us out of a %65 margin. Either way, I'm hoping ARM64 will trickle up from iThingies to the desktop so I can buy a CPU with Virtual MMIO without paying an extra hundred bucks.
- ANTSANTS 13y agoMaybe their desktop and server CPUs aren't so hot right now, but I don't think you have to worry about AMD for a while. All of the current generation of consoles have AMD GPUs, those GPUs are on the same die as an AMD CPU for two of the three (PS4 and Xbone), AMD GPUs remain competitive with NVidia's offerings, and they seem to be winning mindshare with their lower-level Mantle graphics API. EDIT: And the whole Bitcoin-mining thing (or Litecoin/Dogecoin mining thing, these days), as mentioned in another thread.
- elipsey 13y agoDoes AMD GPU hardware have a general advantage mining? err, can you link me to the other thread?
- zanny 13y agoNvidia intentionally cripples the double precision floating point performance of their "gaming" cards to make the market for Tesla cards. AMD doesn't, which is why you don't see much firepro, and why their entire line sells for so much right now while mining on hashes is big.
- dustcoin 13y agoNeither sha256 (bitcoin) nor scrypt (litecoin) mining uses floating point operations. AMD cards are faster because they are built with more, simpler "cores", compared to Nvidia's fewer, more complex "cores". Mining benefits from the increased parallelization and doesn't benefit from Nvidia's "fancy" "cores". For sha256 mining, AMD cards gain an additional advantage by supporting a bit rotation instruction that Nvidia cards do not.
- pippy 13y agoWe're getting close to the age where you can buy a off the shelf AMD desktop machine with Linux, a good graphics card, and the same performance of a x86-64.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- orik 13y agoYou mean an ARM machine?
- pippy 13y agoYes, sorry I meant to type in ARM.
- zanny 13y agoI think saying 8 A57 cores at 2ghz is anything close to x86 at 3.5+ghz on 4 cores. Clock for clock, pipe for pipe (15 stages in A57, 14-19 in Haswell) x86 still wins because of per-instruction operand volume. Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- elwin 13y ago> Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc. As a general rule, power varies with the cube of frequency. 50W will only get about 2.5 GHz.
- bentcorner 13y agoWhere are things wrt the rest of the experience? Can I run FF, Gimp, OpenOffice, arbitrary distros? What about Steam?
- bitL 13y ago25W :-( As much as I wish AMD getting ahead, this is not good news for efficient ARM servers.
- hhandoko 13y agoWhy do you think 25W TDP is not good? I thought it was OK, getting the most performance vs keeping the TDP within passive cooling territory.
- dragontamer 13y ago25W includes the I/O. 8 SATA-3 ports and two 10-GbE ports will run you a lot of power. I can't think of a single SoC that supports that much I/O.
- signa11 13y agowasn't it someone at facebook who remarked that they would be interested in ARM cpu's once the freq > 2.5Ghz, also it seems that google also has a bunch of pa-semi guys, so, they working on an ARM clone isn't so far fetched... edit: found the link http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/16/google_intel_arm_analysis/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/16/google_intel_arm_ana...
- chx 13y ago> Two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Within a 25W envelope??? I thought dual 10GbE chips consume 10-15W.
- colanderman 13y agoDual 10 GbE built-in? Sweet. Wonder what the price will be; a dual 10 GbE Intel card goes for $500 alone. More importantly – will they provide zero-copy I/O like you can get with Intel network cards via their DPDK [1] or PF_RING/DNA [2]? [1] http://dpdk.org/ http://dpdk.org/ [2] http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/dna/ http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/dna/
- thrownaway2424 13y agoI don't think that's "sweet" I think that's a bad decision. What if I don't need two of those per 10 arm cores? Now I'm just paying for gates I don't need.
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoWhat if you don't need AES encryption? Now you're just paying for gates you don't need. What if you don't need SIMD instructions? Now you're just paying for gates you don't need. It doesn't matter. Modern processors have the complete opposite problem. It isn't that transistors are expensive, it's that they're so cheap you end up with too many and they generate too much heat. If you can stick a block on there which 60% of your customers can use and the other 40% can shut off to leave more headroom for frequency scaling, it's a win. Also, the number of gates you need for a network controller is small.
- wmf 13y agoYou haven't been paying for the silicon for a while; when you buy a chip you're really paying for the design and it's cheaper to design one chip with all the features people might need.
- vidarh 13y agoThen you buy a different chip if they're not cost effective. As an entry into the server market, this sounds awesome; for things like storage aggregation and vm migration, gigabit ethernet is becoming a real bottleneck for many applications as the core counts has gone up.
- colanderman 13y ago
- protomyth 13y agoI do wonder when we'll be able to order a motherboard and how much information will be available to create new drivers.
- vardump 13y agoLast time someone made ARM CPU with 1100 in model name, Intel bought them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#SA-1100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#SA-1100.
- jeffdavis 13y agoDoes the ARM architecture have anything like the nested page tables in recent x86-64 chips? Or is that an orthogonal processor feature that is not required (or forbidden) in a particular implementation of ARM/x86-64? To make a real entrance into the server market, I would expect good virtualization support to be nearly a requirement.
- robot 13y agoIt has support for virtualization. There is a two stage translation where the first stage handles guest operating system and second stage handles the hypervisor mappings. Both stages have nested page tables. Also there is an IOMMU implementation for supporting virtualization for IO. For example, the IOMMU and CPU MMU page table mappings are synchronized such that a DMA controller would also adhere to page table mappings set up for the CPU.
- jeffdavis 13y agoRegarding the IOMMU: A recent post revealed some security problems using firewire (and a few other technologies) related to DMA[1]. Would the IOMMU features you're talking about prevent that problem? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7123121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7123121
- robot 13y agoRight. DMA creates security holes because it does not sit behind an MMU. It can change the memory of any guest OS. That means any OS or code that can program the DMA controller can bypass security. IOMMU prevents that, because all IO devices sit behind this MMU. You can have this protection, but then face programming issues if IOMMU and cpu MMU use different page tables. You have to update both. ARM IOMMU is designed so that it is automatically in sync with the CPU tables.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lazyjones 13y agoWhere is the market for this, apart from Facebook (Open Compute Project)? Is it set to compete with CPUs like the Xeon E3-1220L series? Will it end up in HP's Moonshot? I thought that bigger boxes with virtualization would be more economical for most uses than closets full of low-power CPUs. Perhaps I/O is the key here, N of these A1100 CPUs can easily saturate N x 2 x 10GbE, a single box with 64+ cores probably cannot push 16 x 10GbE.
- venomsnake 13y agoProbably it is build it and they will come strategy.
- rbanffy 13y agoThe developer board runs Fedora. Any workload that does not depend on a specific CPU architecture (mostly everything but Windows) should run on it. The dev board is there to make it possible to developers to fine tune their implementations so they run well on the new platform. Will server makers buy it? That remains to be seen. Making a dev board available (let's hope it's also cheap enough to make hobbyists buy it) is rather clever. Without software tuned for it, the chip could fail on the market like Sun's Niagara and Intel's Itanium did.
- thomasfl 13y agoWhile this seems to be targeted for small low power web servers, I really want low powered, cool and low temperature laptops. Laptops with hot intel processors are cooking my body if I actually keep my laptop on my lap.
- kybernetyk 13y agoI have the late 2013 MacBook Air with the new Haswell Core i5 CPU and it's the first time I can put my notebook on my lap for as long as I want without getting a heat stroke. As long as I don't do computing intensive stuff like playing games or visiting some websites that overuse javascript the MBA runs really cool. Cooler than my body temperature. -- typed on my MBA, lying on the couch, having it placed on my belly ;)
- blahbl4hblahtoo 13y agoI have an HP touchsmart haswell i7 that is fantastic with heat and battery life...
- userbinator 13y agoModern processors draw very little power at idle; it's only at full load that they reach TDP. If your laptop is constantly doing something with its CPU then it will obviously get much warmer than one that's just idling. I have one with a Core Duo and it barely gets warm if I'm just reading static webpages and editing text, but really heats up if I'm gaming or watching videos.
- hosh 13y agoCool. I can finally build that ZFS plug computer I wanted :-D
- dragontamer 13y agoI don't think people "get it". This is a microserver, designed to connect up I/O bound resources to each other. Imagine a cache like Squid running on this thing. Imagine mulitiple RAID-0 SSD drives on one side, and 20Gbps going out through the network. This is NOT a computationally difficult task. For computationally difficult tasks, you have 8-core $2000 E5 Xeons (which get more and more efficient the bigger the workload you have). However, filling your datacenter with $2000 Xeons so that they can spend 0.01% of their CPU power copying data from SSD drives to the network is a waste of money and energy. The A1100 looks like it will be a solution in the growing microserver space. As Facebook and Google scales, they have learned that a large subset of their datacenters are I/O bound and that they're grossly overspending on CPU power. Big CPUs -> Big TDPs -> higher energy costs. This machine is designed with big I/O throughput (multiple 10GbE and 8 SATA ports on-chip), with the barest minimum CPU possible to save on energy costs. The upcoming competitors to this market are HP Moonshot (Intel Atoms), AMD Opteron A1100, and... that's about it. Calexda's Boston Viridis has died, so that is one less competitor in this niche.