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AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#61

Post by incrudible »

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.

The 9965 is a much faster chip than the Ampere, but also it is at the point of diminishing returns. The Ampere struggles to match much cheaper AMD offerings in the phoronix suite, it is not better value at all.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#63

Post by aldonius »

> 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!

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#64

Post by Tuna-Fish »

cbmuser wrote: post #34

Really a pity that Oracle killed off SPARC. They already had 32-core CPUs almost a decade ago but Oracle never really understood the value that SPARC and Solaris brought to the table.

... SPARC was terrible. Really just utter excrement. Having a lot of cores is not a good thing when the cores are too slow. This is an interesting CPU because the cores are actually usably fast.

Nearly all programs have a constant memory usage regardless of how fast the core running them is. If you deliberately make your cores half the speed, and double the amount of them, you have approximately doubled the cost of the memory you need. In aggregate, memory already costs so much more than CPUs that this is rarely if ever useful, even if it meant your cpu is free.

The starting point of a design that tiles a lot of cores just needs to be ones of the fastest cores available, or it is not commercially viable.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#65

Post by unscaled »

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!

That would actually be 230V in most countries to be nitpicky. And the split-phase nature of 240V in the US (or 200V here in Japan) does make it somewhat more exotic. I guess building codes may be more expensive when you've got two hot wires?

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#66

Post by UltraSane »

cbmuser wrote: post #34

Really a pity that Oracle killed off SPARC. They already had 32-core CPUs almost a decade ago but Oracle never really understood the value that SPARC and Solaris brought to the table.

SPARC was getting quite slow compared to other architectures and it would have cost a fortune to keep it competitive.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#67

Post by UltraSane »

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!

Every home in the US with an electric stove or water heater is using 240v electricity. It isn't really very exotic. 3 phase power to homes IS very exotic though and I'm not sure why it would be useful in homes.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#69

Post by cat5e »

johnklos wrote: post #51
revnode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You know, there's nothing wrong with running a slow LLM. For some people, they lack the resources to run an LLM on a GPU. For others, they want to try certain models without buying thousands of dollars of equipment just to try things out. Either way, I see too many people putting the proverbial horse before the cart: they buy a video card, then try to fit LLMs in to the limited VRAM they have, instead of playing arou…

Great point

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#70

Post by icedchai »

cbmuser wrote: post #34

Really a pity that Oracle killed off SPARC. They already had 32-core CPUs almost a decade ago but Oracle never really understood the value that SPARC and Solaris brought to the table.

I was a huge Sun fan for most of the 90's and had several Sun systems at home. By the early 2000's, Sun was no longer competitive. Between Intel and Linux, the writing was on the wall. I haven't seen a Sun system used in production since 2003.
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