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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

#191

Post by dragontamer »

bradfa wrote: post #188
dragontamer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, this is super-specialized. I just happen to have studied the AES instructions to a ridiculous degree a few years ago... (https://github.com/dragontamer/AESRand)

You don't come up with 32-bytes of random numbers every 4-clock ticks unless you understand this stuff. :-)

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

#192

Post by mbreese »

monocasa wrote: post #129
mbreese wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. It looks like the last PPC Macs were released in 2005 and were available through 2006 [1]. The last OS that supported them was Leopard, which got Security updates though 2009 [2].

[1] https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/ultimate-mac-timeli...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#Release_histo...

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

#193

Post by GeekyBear »

emn13 wrote: post #166
jeffbee wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even closing the gap before the trade war knocked them out of contention. I don't think apple was really all that special in this regard. They were ahead of the curve, which is impressive, but the market was created by arm, not just apple. I doubt we'd be seeing thi…

> If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace.

Not really. Look at the difference between Apple's "little" cores and the stock ARM "little" core.

>The performance showcased here roughly matches a 2.2GHz Cortex-A76 which is essentially 4x faster than the performance of any other mobile SoC today which relies on Cortex-A55 cores, all while using roughly the same amount of system power and having 3x the power efficiency.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2

Apple's Icestorm "little" cores are in the same performance ballpark as the big cores in the Qualcomm variant of a Galaxy S10.

That's a night and day difference.

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

#194

Post by alexhutcheson »

MikeKusold wrote: post #180
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 :/

Just like with xeon server hardware, you will need to wait 4-6 years for companies to retire their fleets. r730s are currently reasonably priced (under $1K) but those were released new in 2014. R740s are still a few thousand dollars.

Why would you want a 6-year-old server chip? By that point I'd expect a mid-tier consumer chip to have better performance/watt, and much better support for peripherals.

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

#195

Post by foobarian »

adrianmonk wrote: post #183
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 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,…

I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. They are already using TSMC so they are not held back by density.

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

#196

Post by GeekyBear »

pkulak wrote: post #145
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…

It's not totally clear to me if the M1 gains are from the 5nm process, which even AMD hasn't transitioned too yet while still smoking everything Intel on 7nm, from ARM itself, or from some mix of both. Of course, it's probably a mix, but I don't know if ARM alone has much in that mix. It does seem to me that, even if ARM held no performance benefit over x86, Apple would still decide to use it based on their use of it…

When the first chips using Apple's Firestorm cores were announced on 5nm, the theory was that Apple had used the node shrink to decrease power usage, not increase performance.

>The one explanation and theory I have is that Apple might have finally pulled back on their excessive peak power draw at the maximum performance states of the CPUs and GPUs, and thus peak performance wouldn’t have seen such a large jump this generation, but favour more sustainable thermal figures.

Apple’s A12 and A13 chips were large performance upgrades both on the side of the CPU and GPU, however one criticism I had made of the company’s designs is that they both increased the power draw beyond what was usually sustainable in a mobile thermal envelope. This meant that while the designs had amazing peak performance figures, the chips were unable to sustain them for prolonged periods beyond 2-3 minutes. Keeping that in mind, the devices throttled to performance levels that were still ahead of the competition, leaving Apple in a leadership position in terms of efficiency.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...

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

#197

Post by watersb »

buran77 wrote: post #172
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…

> I had an Atom tablet [...] and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life. In all honesty the implementation and OS also matter. Most Atom tablets weren't particularly great (or even good) devices overall. And running Windows on a contemporary ARM SoC wouldn't have resulted in a better experience.

I've got one of those Bay Trail tablets. Its crippled memory bandwidth destroys performance, torpedoes battery (race to sleep).

Apple tends to emphasize memory bandwidth in its own designs.

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

#198

Post by foobarian »

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…

I wonder if x86 really is inherently inefficient, or if it could get there given enough investment (i.e. not just put a 2nd tier team on it for a few months but really push it with major resources). It feels like they just did not want to bother, not that it was impossible.

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

#199

Post by avianlyric »

spockz wrote: post #189
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 vertica…

I have to disagree with this, I really don’t think that Apple is a competitor here.

The M1 chip is undoubtably a remarkable piece of engineering. But it quite clear that Apple are never going to sell it standalone. It also seems extremely unlikely that Apple are going to get back into the server game again.

Apple sell high markup, low volume (relatively) products. Data centre severs are the opposite, and Apple have stated quite explicitly they’re not interested in building anything that isn’t a high margin, luxury, product.

In the consumer space, I can see Apple taking more market share. But again, the vast majority of PC are either business machines, or low margin consumer machines. Both markets that Apple doesn’t seem to be that interested in diving into (their enterprise support is crap, and see above regarding low margin goods for the consumer market).

In all I must disagree with this statement

> So it seems to me that Apple is perfectly aligned to take a large part of the market

Not because Apple doesn’t have the technical chops to do it. But because they just aren’t interested in that market.

As such I think AMD, and other ARM manufacturers have everything to play for, and no need to worry about Apple.

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

#200

Post by avianlyric »

foobarian wrote: post #195
adrianmonk wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. They are already using TSMC so they are not held back by density.

> I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips.

Yeah ARM isn’t x86. Apple made big gains by leveraging the difference in instruction length and complexity between x86 and ARM.

Something AMD can’t do, and they’ve said as much.

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