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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

#101

Post by boudin »

simon1573 wrote: post #18
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

There is already a few ARM laptops that are quite open (like the pine64 ones). There's also ARM boards like the Raspberry PI. I hope that if there's more beefy CPUs and SoCs we'll see those poping up in similar devices as well.

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

#102

Post by khyryk »

alkonaut wrote: post #41

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?

Alder Lake will be a big-little design on 10nm, probably coming in Q3 2021.

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

#103

Post by rrss »

jeffbee wrote: post #71
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…

that’s a statement refuted by the article in which it appears, though. The Ampere system is clearly not suited to latency-sensitive application services, unless you’re just looking to double your latency for no reason. If you looked at these specjbb results because you’re shopping for Java backend servers then you’re buying Xeon yet again.

It's not refuted, because Ampere isn't the only competitor. The statement is that with AMD EPYC and Ampere Altra as options, Intel Xeon loses everywhere.

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

#105

Post by walrus01 »

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 :/

I'll believe these are a real viable thing for ordinary open source Linux/BSD developers, when I can go buy a $150 motherboard and a $250 CPU from newegg, that have performance anywhere NEAR what I can do with the equivalent priced Ryzen. Or even some Intel 10th/11th generation core-whatever i5/i7 CPU.

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

#106

Post by Rapzid »

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…

Maybe, but that's a Zen 2 proc being used and isn't far off in single core perf or really multi-core perf on a lot of tests(with worse single-core perf and fewer cores). It's the latest ARM tech against

Zen 3 EPYC releasing Q1 is likely to be a different story.

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

#107

Post by walrus01 »

SoapSeller wrote: post #29
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 :/

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...

For a thousand bucks of CPU, motherboard and RAM, anyone with a modicum of clue building x86-64 industry standard PC hardware could set up something based on Ryzen that runs circles around that. Probably at least quadruple the performance in any integer or floating point benchmarks.

$659 ryzen 5800X

$250 motherboard

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

#109

Post by jeffbee »

axaxs wrote: post #91
elteto wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?

Yes but they were terrible. Just being ARM isn't some kind of magic dust. It has to actually be fast.

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

#110

Post by walrus01 »

bluGill wrote: post #20
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.

The problem with most of these is availability of a Linux operating system image that is as mature, and close to 'stock' debian as raspbian is. Usually it's some two year old version of Ubuntu that's been cobbled together by the vendor.
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