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AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#31

Post by com2kid »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #21
kevingadd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, utilizing 192 cores for a single process or operation is often exceedingly difficult. Scheduling and coordination and resource sharing are all really hard with thread counts that high, so you're probably best operating in terms of smaller clusters of 4-16 threads instead. Lots of algorithms stop scaling well around the 8-32 range.

When was the last time you saw a server with 10GB Ram no matter the number of cores\threads?

I've run plenty of microservices with 256 or 512 GB of RAM, and they were handling large loads. So long as each request is short lived, and using a runtime with low per request overhead (e.g. Node), memory is not really a problem for many types of workloads.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#33

Post by bangaladore »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #24
kevingadd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, utilizing 192 cores for a single process or operation is often exceedingly difficult. Scheduling and coordination and resource sharing are all really hard with thread counts that high, so you're probably best operating in terms of smaller clusters of 4-16 threads instead. Lots of algorithms stop scaling well around the 8-32 range.

> Lots of algorithms stop scaling well around the 8-32 range. For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

I think a simple way to think about this is with more cores comes more scheduling complexity. That's without even considering how well you can parallelize your actual tasks.

If instead we break 128 cores into 4 core systems, scheduling becomes a much less complex.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#35

Post by cbmuser »

voxadam wrote: post #32
ThinkBeat wrote: post #17

How much does one of these servers' cost? Is the estimate that it is cheaper based on comparable server with the same or similar core count?

From the article: > the AmpereOne A192-32X is $5,555, while the EPYC 9965 is almost $15,000!

Sounds like x86-64 is starting to lose some of it’s market share very soon.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#36

Post by wmf »

cbmuser wrote: post #35
voxadam wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > the AmpereOne A192-32X is $5,555, while the EPYC 9965 is almost $15,000!

Sounds like x86-64 is starting to lose some of it’s market share very soon.

Half of all CPUs in AWS are ARM already.

Update: "Over the last two years, more than 50 percent of all the CPU capacity landed in our datacenters was on AWS Graviton." So not half of all but getting there. https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/12/03/aws-reaps-the-benefi...

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#37

Post by hkchad »

cbmuser wrote: post #35
voxadam wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > the AmpereOne A192-32X is $5,555, while the EPYC 9965 is almost $15,000!

Sounds like x86-64 is starting to lose some of it’s market share very soon.

Yup,

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/INTC:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2a...

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#38

Post by Dylan16807 »

amelius wrote: post #14

> Cores are great, but it's all about how you slice them. Don't think of this as a single 192-core server. Think of it more like 48 dedicated 4-core servers in one box. And each of those servers has 10 gigs of high-speed RAM and consistent performance. Suddenly it sounds less impressive ...

If you use the 1U model you can put about 1800 of those basic servers into a single rack. I think that's pretty impressive.

And they have a dual processor 1U too...

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#39

Post by droideqa »

wmf wrote: post #36
cbmuser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like x86-64 is starting to lose some of it’s market share very soon.

Half of all CPUs in AWS are ARM already. Update: "Over the last two years, more than 50 percent of all the CPU capacity landed in our datacenters was on AWS Graviton." So not half of all but getting there. https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/12/03/aws-reaps-the-benefi...

I just looked it up - that is a mistaken statistic. 50% of their CPUs are not Arm, but AWS has 50% of all server-side Arm CPUs.

"But that total is beaten by just one company – Amazon – which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst."[0]

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#40

Post by touisteur »

loudmax wrote: post #12
znpy wrote: post #2

Weird, but this makes me thing X86-64 might actually be better? It isn't mentioned anywhere in __this__ article, but the power draw of that chip is 276W. I got this from Phoronix [1]: > The AmpereOne A192-32X boasts 192 AmpereOne cores, a 3.2GHz clock frequency, a rated 276 Watt usage power Which is interesting because it's almost half of AMD's 192-core offering [2]. Why is this interesting? the AMD offering draws a…

Jeff says as much. The AMD EPYC core does offer better performance per watt, which says more about AMD than it does about Ampere. But also this: "The big difference is the AmpereOne A192-32X is $5,555, while the EPYC 9965 is almost $15,000!" So you have to look at TCO over a period of years, but that's still quite significant.

Wondering who actually pays public price on those AMD chips in big-OEM servers. Not saying the AmpereOne isn't also discount-able too, but these public prices always feel like signalling, to me, more than a reference to the actual price. Or maybe I'm lucky...
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