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The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

anandtech.com

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Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#11

Post by corty »

Nice hardware, but if I order a hundred, how many will I get? Arm servers so far have been vaporware, only available in single-digit quantities after a very long wait.

There is a new announcement every half year or so by one firm or the other. But we've never managed to get beyond getting a sample, and not for a lack of trying. Numbers just aren't available, models change extremely fast, producers go bancrupt. Maybe it will get better as soon as one of the big server producers starts with Arms?

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#12

Post by corty »

kumarvvr wrote: post #9
boudin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runs Linux natively it seems: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a...

Wow. Never knew Linux architecture allowed it to scale on hardware in such a way. Edit : I know Linux is customized to run on a variety of hardware, I was just pointing out that I never knew you could install Ubuntu on the mentioned hardware and have it take advantage of the available hardware, given that it has specialized hardware.

Linux ran on 512 processor Altix machines more than a decade ago already.

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#13

Post by a2tech »

corty wrote: post #11

Nice hardware, but if I order a hundred, how many will I get? Arm servers so far have been vaporware, only available in single-digit quantities after a very long wait. There is a new announcement every half year or so by one firm or the other. But we've never managed to get beyond getting a sample, and not for a lack of trying. Numbers just aren't available, models change extremely fast, producers go bancrupt. Maybe…

Like Amazon? You know you can get an ARM server there any day of the week for extremely reasonable prices?

Edit: to clarify, I mean on AWS, not from the Amazon store.

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#14

Post by iagovar »

a2tech wrote: post #13
corty wrote: post #11

Nice hardware, but if I order a hundred, how many will I get? Arm servers so far have been vaporware, only available in single-digit quantities after a very long wait. There is a new announcement every half year or so by one firm or the other. But we've never managed to get beyond getting a sample, and not for a lack of trying. Numbers just aren't available, models change extremely fast, producers go bancrupt. Maybe…

Like Amazon? You know you can get an ARM server there any day of the week for extremely reasonable prices? Edit: to clarify, I mean on AWS, not from the Amazon store.

If I can't get a machine for local development I wouldn't care personally. I like the idea of many many threads as I work a lot with data, but i need something like a PC to try things on.

Also, don't really like vendor lock-in.

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#15

Post by mhh__ »

als0 wrote: post #6
boudin wrote: post #4

I love seeing those alternatives to x86, Intel an AMD showing up. After long years of nothing exciting on the CPU side until AMD released Zen, now the M1 from Apple and this, hardware feels exciting again. I also really like the fact that Ampere cpus are not something that will only live in one ecosystem (like the graviton that will, i guess, never exists outside of AWS or the M1 outside of Apple products). I really…

There's an interesting rumor that says AMD is building an ARM SoC for OEMs...

Didn't they build the architecture and then chuck it?

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#16

Post by ur-whale »

kumarvvr wrote: post #9
boudin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runs Linux natively it seems: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a...

Wow. Never knew Linux architecture allowed it to scale on hardware in such a way. Edit : I know Linux is customized to run on a variety of hardware, I was just pointing out that I never knew you could install Ubuntu on the mentioned hardware and have it take advantage of the available hardware, given that it has specialized hardware.

Linux has been running on 2000+ core machines for longer than a decade (at least):

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/how-many-cores...

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#18

Post by simon1573 »

boudin wrote: post #4

I love seeing those alternatives to x86, Intel an AMD showing up. After long years of nothing exciting on the CPU side until AMD released Zen, now the M1 from Apple and this, hardware feels exciting again. I also really like the fact that Ampere cpus are not something that will only live in one ecosystem (like the graviton that will, i guess, never exists outside of AWS or the M1 outside of Apple products). I really…

I'm excited as well. But as an earlier discussion pointed out I'm worried that the transition might impact the openness in PCs, e.g. locked bootloaders etc

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#19

Post by oarsinsync »

xuki wrote: post #10
Sebb767 wrote: post #2

These things look awesome, but are pretty expensive, still. I'd love to put an ARM server in my homelab, but the price range between 100$ (RPi & Co) and 10000$ (enterprise server) seems pretty empty right now :/

Just wait for virtualization on M1 Mac.

That’s useful if you’re not averse to MacOS. Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits, and turning their back on decades of computing history with no “legacy” Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)

Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

#20

Post by bluGill »

Sebb767 wrote: post #2

These things look awesome, but are pretty expensive, still. I'd love to put an ARM server in my homelab, but the price range between 100$ (RPi & Co) and 10000$ (enterprise server) seems pretty empty right now :/

There are several multi-board RPi&Co solutions. Pine64 has some interesting offerings in this space.
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