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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

#81

Post by jeffbee »

waynesonfire wrote: post #73
cameron_b wrote: post #42

This 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 datacenter…

> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.

Right? "This platform does/does not run my software" is a huge checkbox when buying computers. The viewpoint of people who actually specify, buy, and operate servers at scale is severely underrepresented in these discussions.

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

#82

Post by ipodopt »

elteto wrote: post #75
cameron_b wrote: post #42

This 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 datacenter…

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on con…

The RISC-V ISA would be the better bet.

a. They start investing now and they can have some leverage in the spec.

b. The spec is minimal and open to expansion that it sets itself up for more domain specific processors. Which we will be seeing alot more of thanks to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth.

c. There is a pretty big theme of moving toward more open and democratized standards in tech.

d. They would be the big dogs in RISC-V where as ARM already has big players.

e. In both ARM and RISC-V they would be saving the need for extra transistors. My understanding is that there are extra transistors that basically translate x86 machine code to some internal RISC ISA for performance reasons on x86 processors. Due to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth and the maturation of external Fabs Intel and AMD will no longer be able to 'hide' this deficit.

f. No royalties

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

#83

Post by coder543 »

jeffbee wrote: post #81
waynesonfire wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.

Right? "This platform does/does not run my software" is a huge checkbox when buying computers. The viewpoint of people who actually specify, buy, and operate servers at scale is severely underrepresented in these discussions.

Keep in mind that Intel also has to compete with AMD... and AMD is also x86_64.

AMD and Altra are trading blows at the high end of performance, as seen in this article, while Intel is... not, except in extremely specialized applications.

Intel servers don't even offer PCIe 4.0 at this time, which is just a bad joke when it comes to building out servers with lots of high performance storage and networking. For now, Intel offers (relatively) poor CPU performance and poor peripheral performance.

So, if your software can't run on Altra, the other choice for high performing servers is AMD, not Intel, unless you're just locked into Intel for historical reasons.

Intel does have some nice budget offerings for cheap servers, though, such as Xeon D.

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

#84

Post by jcranmer »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #49
tlamponi wrote: post #48

So 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?

It's not a dumb question; it's actually the defining characteristic of performance for large systems.

In a shared-memory multiprocessor, all cores and all memory are logically connected along a massive shared bus, and both inter-core communication and regular core-to-main-memory communication takes up slots on the bus. In practice, of course, it isn't physically a single bus but a more complex topology (usually meshes, I think) with protocols that make it like a bus for cache coherency purposes.

One of the readily apparent consequences of interconnect is NUMA, non-uniform memory accesses. Historically (my information on this matter is a few years out of date, so I don't know how much this is true today), this has been a bigger issue for AMD than Intel, as AMD had wildly divergent memory latencies (2-3× between worst/best case) even for a 4-core processor. So if the OS decided to resume execution of a sleeping program on a different core, your performance might suddenly drop by ½ or ⅓.

For some benchmarks (such as classic SPEC, or make -j), multicore performance is approximated by running the same binary on every core and there is no sharing between different copies. The interconnect here matters only insomuch as the cross-chatter on the interconnect may impede performance. But HPC applications tend to be much more sensitive to the actual interconnect, since reading and writing from other processors' memory is more common (transferring halo data, or having global data structures that you need to read from and occasionally write).

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

#85

Post by klelatti »

jeffbee wrote: post #81
waynesonfire wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.

Right? "This platform does/does not run my software" is a huge checkbox when buying computers. The viewpoint of people who actually specify, buy, and operate servers at scale is severely underrepresented in these discussions.

So you're never going to consider moving to another architecture because your software (currently) doesn't run on it?

So Amazon made a huge mistake with Graviton then? Last time I checked Amazon 'specify, buy, and operate servers at scale'.

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

#86

Post by nine_k »

tlamponi wrote: post #48

So 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…

Another anecdote: in 1990s, Sun servers had relatively "weak" Sparq CPUs, contemporary Intels would wipe the floor with them in integer performance tests. But they had superior interconnect and I/O channels, so e.g. in 4-core configurations Sparq-based servers showed much better application performance (say, running Oracle RDBMS) than the beefier Intel 4-CPU machines.

The connection fabric is utterly important, and expensive.

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

#87

Post by pinewurst »

waynesonfire wrote: post #73
cameron_b wrote: post #42

This 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 datacenter…

> "Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time." What? That makes so little sense. Is this chip x86 or something? Because the architecture is a pretty big deal for me when I decide which chip to invest in.

What they mean (IMHO) is that Intel pricing on Xeon Platinum SKUs is so disproportional to their comparative performance that they would be foolish to purchase.

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

#88

Post by nine_k »

floatboth wrote: post #55
SoapSeller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get SolidRun HoneyComb[0] for ~$1000, it has 16 cores with supposedly reasonable performance. [0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

Reasonable, but not exciting. Cortex-A72 is quite old by now. Just compare EC2 a1 instances vs. the newer ones.

Just compare how much such an exciting AWS instance would cost in a month.

You can't compare it to owning a whole machine for several years, having bought it once.

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

#89

Post by sitkack »

elteto wrote: post #75
cameron_b wrote: post #42

This 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 datacenter…

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on con…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series

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

#90

Post by nine_k »

elteto wrote: post #75
cameron_b wrote: post #42

This 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 datacenter…

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on con…

I hope somebody will come up with a standard and open way to boot an ARM board and to enumerate devices on it, much like BIOS does for x86 boards.

Possibly the makers of Pine64 and Raspberry Pi could cooperate and offer something in this area, because they collectively control most of the market of hobby / general-purpose ARM system boards. If they set a common standard (or even two standards), other producers in this space would have an incentive to follow. This will simplify OS porting efforts enormously.

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