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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

#121

Post by monocasa »

ipodopt wrote: post #99
spamizbad wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's still the case but RISC-V was beating ARM in code size as well

I find that a bit surprising since my understanding is RISC-V is more minimal (has fewer higher level instructions) (ATM, that will change with extensions) then ARM. This paper refutes your point and is inline with my understanding: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perot... One counter point is the simpler the ISA the more work the compiler needs to do. So x86 is may be easier to write an optimi…

My understanding was that RV was less dense than the ARM-M Thumb variants, but more dense than AArch64 like these servers would be.

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

#122

Post by bradfa »

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…

I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do.

For some workloads, special things like AES-NI or other optimizations which only Intel (or another vendor) have can make a huge difference in real world performance which generalized benchmarks don't cover.

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

#123

Post by dragontamer »

blodkorv wrote: post #30
txdv wrote: post #17

32cores 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

When doing my home programming projects, I regularly max out my 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper for minutes, or even hours. If you're not taking minutes to hours per programming task, you aren't really pushing the limits of modern computers. High-performance GPU and/or CPU is great.

Things like "what's the best 32-bit number for my custom random number generator" ?? (Try all 4-billion+ 32-bit numbers and run statistics on them, then sort the results). Except not really, that kind of search takes less than 10 seconds now, lol. But that should give you an idea of the size / scale of modern CPU power.

Or searching for chess or other AI search tasks. Or deep learning. Or raytracing. Or LTSpice simulations. Or... you get the gist.

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

#124

Post by monocasa »

nine_k wrote: post #90
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 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 thi…

The BIOS doesn't really let you enumerate devices on x86. That mainly happens through PCI config space.

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

#125

Post by monocasa »

coder543 wrote: post #83
jeffbee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, I…

Ironically Xeon-D seems to have been quietly cancelled.

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

#126

Post by dragontamer »

bradfa wrote: post #122
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…

I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do. For some workloads, special things like AES-NI or other optimizations which only Intel (or another vendor) have can make a huge difference in real world performance w…

> I'd be curious to see AES encryption performance compared between the same CPUs from Ampere, Intel, and AMD. In my experience, Intel have a significant performance advantage with their AES-NI implementation over AMD. I wonder what Ampere's cores can do.

AMD in Zen1 had 2x AES-pipelines, allowing 2x 128-bit AES operations per clocktick.

Intel caught up later, and eventually also added 2x AES-pipelines of their own. But then AMD added 256-bit AES instructions to Zen3 (which are 128-bit x2 vectorized).

AVX512 does have 4x SIMD AES on AVX512 (4x128 bit wide), for 4x parallel AES computations per clock tick. But that's not on consumer chips. I guess that's the widest AES implementation right now however, but AMD isn't that far behind in Zen3.

--------

If anything, I'd say AMD actually was beating Intel at the AES-benchmark at Zen1 (In year ~2017 or so), but Intel / AMD have been trading blows with each other since then.

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

#127

Post by pjmlp »

my123 wrote: post #62
flyinghamster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Finding out that Big Sur phones home every time one opens an application is a showstopper for me, never mind Apple's ever-changing ports and its campaign against the right to repair. We've also already seen that Microsoft considers ARM systems to be "special" enough to require locked bootloaders as well. Don't get me started on the mess in the smartphone world. I'd hate to see a world where the only "open" compu…

Windows on arm64 systems aren't locked down. Meanwhile for arm64 Macs, they aren't either. Yesterday, https://twitter.com/xenokovah/status/1339914714055368704?s=2... was released to run unsigned kernels.

When Windows 10X gets release it might be different, as the original before COVID happened was for it to be the introduction of Win32 sandboxing as well.

Now with Reunion merging both worlds, and Windows 10X only planned for 2021, it might be a different story.

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

#128

Post by smspf »

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…

ThunderX was a huge disappointment. ThunderX2 (which one may think is the successor of ThunderX, but is actually a completely different system that Cavium obtained by acquiring a different company that was also working on ARMv8 hardware) was a (not so huge) disappointment. Cavium tried to copy-paste lots of coprocessors and offload things from the CPU, but the overall system was not that great.

Early AMD Softiron and Applied Micro boards (which had 8 cores unlike the ThunderX which had 48 or 96) were actually faster, which I always found interesting.

But Ampere's previous generation (before N1) is fast, much faster than the ThunderX2. Afaik, they built it on top of previous Applied Micro IP. So I'd expect N1 to be in a different league and not worth comparing to ThunderX2.

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

#129

Post by monocasa »

mbreese wrote: post #35
corty wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't play a role. Until it does. Some future MacOS may need support of some new architecture feature, then it'll be "better buy an Arm13 mac if you want to run MacOS 2023!". Apple doesn't have a very good track record about supporting their own old hardware in new MacOS releases. Several iMacs and MacMinis come to mind. Their past behaviour sets a benchmark for their future behaviour, and since there are no re…

What? Big Sur supports hardware that is at least 7 years old. Catalina goes back to 2012 (and still gets security updates). For an OS vendor that has yearly updates, they do a pretty good job of supporting older hardware. https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility

The PowerPC->Intel transition led to an OSX release that was Intel only just three years after the first Intel hardware was released.

Apple's known for cutting compatibility when they have some goal that's served by it, or it's viewed as an albatross by their product side.

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

#130

Post by yborg »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #78
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 just blown away that Apple gets the credit for the Arm switch, but I'll take it.

Apple has been running ARM processors since the original iPhone.
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