How close are Intel to releasing anything that's a "next gen" core design and not just incremental design change or node shrink? When will Intel's "Zen2" arrive? Are there any rumors?
The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
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Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#42This line is the kicker for me:
"Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time."
The rest of the paragraph twists the knife more, and declares there to be an open market on server hardware for AMD and Ampere to fight it out.
With application stacks being what they are and optimizations for Xeon so deeply integrated, it's unlikely that folks running private datacenters actually feel the same way, but if I was spinning up a new company with the sort of funding to be able to decide between self-hosted or cloud I would have some math to do.
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#43How close are Intel to releasing anything that's a "next gen" core design and not just incremental design change or node shrink? When will Intel's "Zen2" arrive? Are there any rumors?
SemiAccurate thinks no where on the horizon. They have a good track record on these things.
See this for example.
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2020/11/12/intel-delays-a-mains...
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most (> 98%?) supercomputers run Linux. Has been so for many years.
Those are mostly a bazillion nodes with a couple dozen Xeon cores each, wired up together (over a very nice interconnect). Each Linux instance only has to handle the cores for a single node.
That said, I agree with you that it isn't particularly surprising that Linux handles lots of cores fine, it's been run on more esoteric hardware for ages.
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The last time discussions about Linux and SMP were hip, its competitors were Windows 2000 and 2003 :-D
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reasonable is relative to what you want to do: Cloud instances are only cheap if your machines are usually idle, and you overprovisioned your datacenter massively. Cloud instances are only cheap if there is no great amount of output/input data to transfer like simulation results or large model input datasets. Cloud instances are only cheap if you don't need assurances about locality or security for compliance. Cloud…
You left out management cost. Once you’re talking something more than a personal laptop the cost of administration needs to be factored in. This is where cloud environments have some big advantages since you’re not paying skilled people to run cables, debug firmware, swap parts, etc. Yes, you can still beat cloud (especially if you serve a lot of network traffic) but it’s not easy unless you’re giving up security, fe…
> run cables, debug firmware, swap parts, etc.
Data centers already do that. You could build your own rack and send it to them, but the more common model is renting preconfigured servers on a monthly or annual basis with them swapping out broken hardware as needed etc.
Cloud computing can save on administrative costs, but there is a huge world between building everything in house and AWS.
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#4732cores for 800$, feasible for a nice home server rig
but really, in what way would 32 cores become useful in a home server, except running a bunch of VMs that do nothing or donate money in terms of electricity to folding@home
Since it is ARM, running them at 0% would use little electricity :)
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#48So how are the cores interconnected? As ARM server designs love to throw out tens to hundreds of cores which sounds good on paper, but are not really useful to lots of workloads as they have a shit interconnect or lots of NUMA nodes.
Interconnect is key, e.g., see the improvements between zen2 and zen3, especially for the `4 An anecdote: I got some hands on a box with a Cavium ThunderX2 96 logical core processor about two years ago, kernel compiled slower than on my high-end, but non overclocked and common, i7 based workstation from ~ 2015 - that is certainly not to a statistical relevant comparison and there may be some workloads that do good with those CPUs, but it's neither single thread nor massively parallel, maybe something in between...
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#49So how are the cores interconnected? As ARM server designs love to throw out tens to hundreds of cores which sounds good on paper, but are not really useful to lots of workloads as they have a shit interconnect or lots of NUMA nodes. Interconnect is key, e.g., see the improvements between zen2 and zen3, especially for the `4 An anecdote: I got some hands on a box with a Cavium ThunderX2 96 logical core processor abou…
This is a dumb question. But as you've said, cores per die has a strong influence on how performant a system is and that's because of the processor interconnects. My question is, what are the processors saying to each other?
Re: The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster
#50These 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 :/
Do I read the table on https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review... incorrectly?
To me, it says they have a system with 32 CPUs at 1.7 GHz for $800, and a whole range between $2,200 and $4,050.