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AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#101

Post by bzzzt »

cainxinth wrote: post #100

> High-core-count servers are the cutting edge in datacenters, and they're so insane, most software doesn't even know how to handle it. Why not? We hit the single thread wall more than a decade ago. Why isn’t more software parallelized by now?

Almost all service middleware is capable of running tasks in multiple threads so when serving lots of users that's a very easy way to get parallelism. If you're just copying data around (like in an HTTP API implementation) you're mostly I/O bound anyway and adding more compute won't help that much so there's no return on investment.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#102

Post by nocsi »

cainxinth wrote: post #100

> High-core-count servers are the cutting edge in datacenters, and they're so insane, most software doesn't even know how to handle it. Why not? We hit the single thread wall more than a decade ago. Why isn’t more software parallelized by now?

There's overhead with parallelization. Security issues, race conditions and resource contention. I think the big one is its ass to debug.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#103

Post by lioeters »

ta988 wrote: post #84
remram wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually distribute 240V in USAmerica, one neutral wire and two opposite-phase 120V wires. Outlets in homes are 120V but wiring 240V is not difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power This is different from Europe where we usually distribute 3 phases 130V.

3 phases 230v you mean?

> In Europe, three-phase 230/400 V is most commonly used. However, 130/225 V, three-wire, two-phase electric power discontinued systems called B1 are used to run old installations in small groups of houses when only two of the three-phase high-voltage conductors are used.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#105

Post by chasil »

bee_rider wrote: post #47
chasil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use xargs -P every weekend to back up my (Oracle) database. It has 510 files that are around 2gb, and the parallel script uses rman to make a datafile copy on each one, lzip it, then scp it to my backup server. I have xargs set to run 10 at once. Could I increase to 192? Yes.

So the part that would actually benefit from the 192 cores would just be the lzip, right?

Oracle enterprise database actually has a retail license cost of $47,500 per cpu core. On x86, there is a two-for-one license discount.

In my setup, I have an nfs automount set up from a 12-core machine to my 8-core database. The rman backup and the scp happen locally, but yes, the lzip runs on the compute server.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#106

Post by UltraSane »

korhojoa wrote: post #81
UltraSane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? The benefits of 3-phase power are really only used by factories with lots of large electric motors. 3 phase has no benefit for resistance heating.

You can move more power per conductor with three conductors than with two. As a sidenote, my apartment has a 3x63A main fuse. Three-phase is everywhere here. Really convenient for ev charging too.

Delivering 100 amps over 240 volt is not an issue.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#107

Post by [deleted] »

ta988 wrote: post #84
remram wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually distribute 240V in USAmerica, one neutral wire and two opposite-phase 120V wires. Outlets in homes are 120V but wiring 240V is not difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power This is different from Europe where we usually distribute 3 phases 130V.

3 phases 230v you mean?

[deleted]

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#108

Post by just6979 »

remram wrote: post #74
aldonius wrote: post #63

> I'm also happy to see systems like this that run without exotic water cooling and 240V power. Always funny to see 240V power described as exotic (or at least exotic-adjacent). It's the standard across practically the entire world except North and Central America!

They actually distribute 240V in USAmerica, one neutral wire and two opposite-phase 120V wires. Outlets in homes are 120V but wiring 240V is not difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power This is different from Europe where we usually distribute 3 phases 130V.

> but wiring 240V is not difficult.

Most homes don't have more than a few 240v circuits, and they are usually always dedicated to a single device. My house has 4: range, oven, drier, water heater, all with only a single outlet. The concept of wiring split-phase 240V is not difficult, but getting 4-conductor 12-gauge wiring run to a new location in an existing building is not exactly easy.

So, the power delivery type/format _isn't_ exotic, but the ability to use it in arbitrary locations in a [residential] building, compared to 120V being in every room (though perhaps not 120V/20A in every room)

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#109

Post by simtel20 »

acdha wrote: post #97
elcritch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a pity now that the most advanced process nodes would be available via TSMC. Solaris seemed to be much more solid than linux overall.

Solaris was more stable in the mid-90s but that advantage had flipped by the turn of the century. It was an order of magnitude more expensive to support, especially at scale because Linux was far ahead on packaging and configuration management by 1998 or so, which in practice meant that no two Solaris boxes were the same unless your organization was willing to spend a lot of money on staffing. Solaris 10 was intended…

Yep packaging was a nightmare. The fix for a bug in cron could require you to apply a kernel patch and reboot. But not if you had already applied a different kernel patch beforehand for some specific hardware, but which wasn't available except for particular hardware. But if you just install the patch it may succeed! But it didn't really apply, because the solver that figures out your patches ran separately and doesn't run fast enough to be part of the patch process but the patch has its own script that checks whatever separately to determine that. Oh and if you wait a week your process may break because the -20 version of the patch doesn't fix your problem anymore but it superceded the -12 version you were using anyway. But whichever one you apply, you'll have to reboot.

Like, to update cron. Even though through 3 versions of the same patch id, it does and does not fix cron.

Pure insanity with no product focus on user experience.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#110

Post by lostmsu »

revnode wrote: post #28
loudmax wrote: post #20

I found this part particularly interesting: > Also, with 512 gigs of RAM and a massive CPU, it can run a 405 billion parameter Large Language Model. It's not fast, but it did run, giving me just under a token per second. If you're serious about running LLMs and you can afford it, you'll of course want GPUs. But this might be a relatively affordable way to run really huge models like Llama 405B on your own hardware. T…

It's really slow. Like, unusably slow. For those interested in self-hosting, this is a really good resource: https://github.com/XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inferen...

This resource looks very bad to me as they don't check batched inference at all. This might make sense now when most people a just running single query at once, but pretty soon almost everything will be running queries in parallel to take advantage of the compute.
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