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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

#131

Post by pjmlp »

iagovar wrote: post #14
a2tech wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2004 I was using telnet/X Windows into the UNIX development server of the company, in 2020 I use ssh/Web/RDP for the cloud environment instead.

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

#132

Post by pjmlp »

panpanna wrote: post #25
kumarvvr wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Ironically with IBM tooling though, many of those computers use xlc toolchain.

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

#133

Post by Someone »

privong wrote: post #53
Someone wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's the processor only? I'm basing that off the paragraph after the table, which says: > AMD’s EPYC 7742 which still comes in at $6950 A couple quick searches (Amazon, Newegg) show people selling the CPU-only for this price. Since that's the price they're comparing to the table, I think the table prices are for the ARM CPU only.

Thanks! I already found $800 cheapish, but didn’t consider it a price for just the CPU; my mind isn’t used to see server prices, it seems.

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

#134

Post by ed25519FUUU »

random5634 wrote: post #116
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…

AMD is doing fine. "The writing on the wall". Zen3 is going to very competitive, their interconnect on chip is great. Sure, add a line for ARM. What's interesting to me, I feel like a lot of this started when intel wouldn't do the chip for the iphone. All of a sudden you had this leading edge mfg pushing arm hard which drove volumes through the roof, and all the copycats (android etc) copied the chip selection, scree…

Indeed, the writing on the wall is that AMD is eating Intel's lunch is and positioned to dominate the server x86 market.

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

#135

Post by cesarb »

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…

It already exists, it's called Server Base System Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...). AFAIK, this Ampere Altra follows that standard, which is how unmodified Linux distributions can run on it (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a... tested both CentOS and Ubuntu).

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

#136

Post by Alupis »

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…

AMD might already be working on an ARM design[1].

[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-....

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

#137

Post by ed25519FUUU »

I'm surprised I searched this whole thread and didn't see a single mention of NVIDIA! It seems everyone wants either Intel or AMD to pivot to ARM64 (very unlikely) in the server space. But with NVIDIA's $40 billion purchase of ARM -- I wonder what they're cooking up?

I think a high-performance ARM64 CPU from NVIDIA with an on-die GPU would be a great offering. In many benchmarks it's actually the on-die GPU that makes the M1 so much faster. A general purpose on-die GPU would help speed up a lot of low and mid-level cloud workloads, especially with native kernel support.

Good luck, NVIDIA. And godspeed!

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

#138

Post by toast0 »

monocasa wrote: post #124
nine_k wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "IBM PC architecture" tells you where to find the PCI config space (either the well known i/o address 0x0CF8 and friends, or memory mapped address found in ACPI tables)

BIOS provided tables allow you to enumerate devices that aren't on the PCI bus, and BIOS provides methods to interact with storage devices. UEFI does all the same things, but differently.

A lot of ARM64 boards intended towards general purpose use include UEFI these days.

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

#139

Post by cogman10 »

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?

Has anyone seriously used chromebooks for development work?

That's the difference.

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

#140

Post by jeffbee »

mhh__ wrote: post #69
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 are also miles ahead when it comes to software and documentation. Intel's optimization guide alone is about 1000 pages long, AMD's isn't as good and they've been at it for decades now. If you have the money Intel aren't as competitive any more, but for the middle ground where you don't have the budget to bring up your own software it's not the same calculus.

This is an important point. Intel has a quite mature performance analysis stack that AMD doesn't match. Their performance management unit in Skylake-SP and later is very capable, and the one in Tiger Lake, Ice lake or later doubles the number of counters and adds other abilities. It's a software ecosystem that allows you to get a very high level of performance out of your software, if your shop is building its own software.
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