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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

#181

Post by rjsw »

klelatti wrote: post #154
random5634 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that Intel producing the iPhone chip was ever likely to happen - sure Jobs had to ask Intel as a courtesy for a partner but it was never realistic. - Arm has dominated low power / mobile segment from well before the iPhone due to its superior power consumption; - The non Arm IP (eg Imagination GPU) was also important and it was unlikely that Intel would have been integrated that on their SoCs. I had an…

The first Atom SoCs used an Imagination GPU.

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

#182

Post by dragontamer »

pinewurst wrote: post #87
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.

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.

Xeon Platinum supports 8-socket machines. 6x memory channels x 8-sockets == 48x DIMMs for your massive 6TB RAM servers.

Platinum is crazy priced for a crazy reason: its a building block to truly massive computers that only IBM matches. Supercomputers don't even typically use Platinum: Platinum is for the most vertically-oriented systems.

---------

Xeon Gold is your more typical 2-socket or 4-socket machines: same performance, but fewer sockets supported.

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

#183

Post by adrianmonk »

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 should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs.

This is a really tough strategy decision. Focus all energy on delivering a knock-out blow to Intel (in x86/64) or try to do other stuff too?

For the next several years at least, there is still a whole lot of money to be made selling x86/64 chips. (I don't know if Microsoft has plans to move mainstream Windows users off x86/64, but even if they do, it won't happen quickly.)

Right now, AMD has an opportunity to take x86/64 away from Intel. Probably the best opportunity in decades. There's something to be said for focusing all resources on delivering a knock-out blow right now, before the opportunity is gone.

On the other hand, ARM might have a better future over the long term. And it isn't necessarily true that AMD would be spreading itself too thin by trying to do both.

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

#184

Post by ATsch »

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 recall AMD mentioning that their Zen architecture is pretty generic and that it would not be hard to make it execute ARM instructions instead. AMD has worked on this before, although the project was canned, but there's been some rumors recently of it having been resurrected.

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

#185

Post by kristopolous »

cure wrote: post #162
random5634 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I wonder how different the path might have been if intel had come up with something for apple. They kind of tried and failed. Intel is completely stuck in their "x86 is the only way" culture. x86 just can't compete in the low power space. For phones, the x86 power requirements made it effectively DOA. Sure, Atom could have competed with arm in some markets (small laptops for example, they had some success in the ea…

They turned Apple down in 2005 to make the iPhone processor.

They've been shooting themselves in the foot toe by toe for a while.

I hope they come back for a while though, I mean at least to like $55/share for undisclosed personal reasons.

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

#186

Post by klelatti »

rjsw wrote: post #181
klelatti wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that Intel producing the iPhone chip was ever likely to happen - sure Jobs had to ask Intel as a courtesy for a partner but it was never realistic. - Arm has dominated low power / mobile segment from well before the iPhone due to its superior power consumption; - The non Arm IP (eg Imagination GPU) was also important and it was unlikely that Intel would have been integrated that on their SoCs. I had an…

The first Atom SoCs used an Imagination GPU.

Interesting - and I stand corrected - thanks.

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

#187

Post by ATsch »

klelatti wrote: post #98
nine_k wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet there will be enough interest in keeping a top-tier fab facility and expertise on the US soil. If I were DoD, I would be very interested, for instance.

Probably connected: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/317329-tsmc-will-ope... Not sure if it has to be absolutely top-tier for defense purposes though.

I personally expect those plans to be dropped or cut back relatively soon as Trump leaves office. I don't think the 2024 date for this plan was at all a coincidence. Taiwan is extremely shifty about their semiconductor tech leaving the island. Of course, 5nm would be very outdated by then either way.

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

#188

Post by bradfa »

dragontamer wrote: post #160
bradfa wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been able to test any Zen 3 CPUs. Now I'm curious! From benchmarks listed here: https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html it seems that Intel had similar performance in their 2015 release of the i7-6700 as AMD's 2017 release of Ryzen 7 1800X. Raw general purpose benchmarks I found via Google put the Ryzen 7 1800X at about twice the compute capability as an i7-6700, but their AES performance is quite ev…

CBC mode cannot be parallelized. That is a sequential-only algorithm, and none of the stuff I talked about before can take advantage of CBC mode. GCM mode can be parallelized. Notice AES-128-GCM (which can take advantage of 2x pipelines) really flies on Zen1 compared to 6700.

Regardless, it does really all come down to what your compute need is, and specialized metrics for somewhat odd-ball cases can sometimes still heavily favor Intel for the money.

Thanks for your comments! I didn't previously fully comprehend how the AVX modes and pipeline widths mattered for AES.

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

#189

Post by spockz »

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…

The reason why the M1 performs so well, next to its insanely wide out of order capabilities, is that Apple placed Specialized processors really close and gave everything a fast connection. Then because they control a large part of The OS and applications they rewrote the underlying macOS libraries and the applications to make use of these specific co processors. They were able to achieve this because they are vertically integrated.

When AMD would switch to RISC they could also create a huge out of order capable cpu but would be lacking the co processors plus the tight integration and if they could add them they would lack the capability to drive and dictate that the cpu would be used in the most performant way.

So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market and AMD as a general purpose cpu designer will need to come with a very competitive cpu either on x86 (ZenX) or on RISC to stay competitive. They can outsource the fabrication the chips. Intel meanwhile with its owned fabs has a lot more inertia and ego to turn around.

On the other hand, maybe AMD or Intel will find a way to increase the re-order buffer and the amount of “splicer” (I forgot the official name for the unit that takes the instruction code and translates it into chunks of microcode).

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

#190

Post by wmf »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #179
wmf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marvell/Cavium just canceled their server processors.

I thought they cancelled years ago and switched to HPC. Something recent?

Earlier this year ThunderX 3 was pitched as a server processor, then it was hyperscale-only, then it was canceled.
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