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HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

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Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#3
post #2

2U is only available in Japan. They only ship whole Rack internationally. May be someone could give some hints as to why?

Probably they don't want to deal with the overhead of international sales, shipping, logistics and support for just a $40k contract.

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#4
An A64FX CPU has 48 cores. 1 CPU/node means 96 cores on 2 nodes for $40k and ~6TFLOPS (3 per). Meanwhile the 128 thread Threadripper 3990X costs $3.6k, and benchs put it at 1.5TFLOPS in Linpack, which is less but not 10x less, and I don't know what the benchmark basis for the A64FX value is, so I suspect it's closer, especially since it says theoretical peak performance.

... Am I missing something?

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#5

An A64FX CPU has 48 cores. 1 CPU/node means 96 cores on 2 nodes for $40k and ~6TFLOPS (3 per). Meanwhile the 128 thread Threadripper 3990X costs $3.6k, and benchs put it at 1.5TFLOPS in Linpack, which is less but not 10x less, and I don't know what the benchmark basis for the A64FX value is, so I suspect it's closer, especially since it says theoretical peak performance. ... Am I missing something?

It has 1 TB/s memory bandwidth via HBM2, and 512 bit vector units. A better comparison would probably be to Xeon Phi (not that it's lighting the world on fire exactly).

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#6
What is up with the price? 40k for only 2 x 48 cores and a mediocre 2 ghz clock rate. Modern processors are way more efficient than older processors but I simply can't imagine the efficiency adds up to (simplistically) $416 per core...

Very interesting memory bus though... 1 TB / s? That is cool, but I would still much rather get a crap load more cores at a reasonable price then be able to send around data that efficiently. Granted, I am definitely not the target audience for this.

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#7

An A64FX CPU has 48 cores. 1 CPU/node means 96 cores on 2 nodes for $40k and ~6TFLOPS (3 per). Meanwhile the 128 thread Threadripper 3990X costs $3.6k, and benchs put it at 1.5TFLOPS in Linpack, which is less but not 10x less, and I don't know what the benchmark basis for the A64FX value is, so I suspect it's closer, especially since it says theoretical peak performance. ... Am I missing something?

It has 1 TB/s memory bandwidth via HBM2, and 512 bit vector units. A better comparison would probably be to Xeon Phi (not that it's lighting the world on fire exactly).

Ah fair, I think the 3990x only gets 100GB/s at quad DDR4 3200, if I'm interpreting the Google results right. That could be a killer. And there's no AVX512 support either (though it does have -256).

Would be good to have some actual benchmarks to compare.

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#8

An A64FX CPU has 48 cores. 1 CPU/node means 96 cores on 2 nodes for $40k and ~6TFLOPS (3 per). Meanwhile the 128 thread Threadripper 3990X costs $3.6k, and benchs put it at 1.5TFLOPS in Linpack, which is less but not 10x less, and I don't know what the benchmark basis for the A64FX value is, so I suspect it's closer, especially since it says theoretical peak performance. ... Am I missing something?

You're comparing the price of a consumer CPU to an entire rackable unit. There's a whole bunch of more stuff that goes into making a good server than just stuffing a good CPU into a beige box.

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#9
post #6

What is up with the price? 40k for only 2 x 48 cores and a mediocre 2 ghz clock rate. Modern processors are way more efficient than older processors but I simply can't imagine the efficiency adds up to (simplistically) $416 per core... Very interesting memory bus though... 1 TB / s? That is cool, but I would still much rather get a crap load more cores at a reasonable price then be able to send around data that effic…

If you need that kind of memory bandwidth you'll probably know already, and maybe this will even look cheap.

HBM not only has lotsa bandwidth(tm) but also much better latency?

Re: HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

#10
post #6

What is up with the price? 40k for only 2 x 48 cores and a mediocre 2 ghz clock rate. Modern processors are way more efficient than older processors but I simply can't imagine the efficiency adds up to (simplistically) $416 per core... Very interesting memory bus though... 1 TB / s? That is cool, but I would still much rather get a crap load more cores at a reasonable price then be able to send around data that effic…

it's almost as if the price of the system reflects more than core count.

in any case, anyone buying one of these is doing so as a poc for a larger procurement.

they're not for tourists.

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