Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
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Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#2https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-severs-itself-from-arm...
I suppose this has much to do with it ...
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#3Frankly, ARM server chips have always SEEMED like they held a lot of promise but never delivered on this. If you want power efficiency per-thread, I struggle to see the value of an ARM chip vs a voltage-optimized x64 CPU. It definitely seems like there's an unaddressed market here, but I also feel like if Intel/AMD felt that Amazon Gravity or Alibaba were starting to impact their market share they'd just release TDP-binned server chips.
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#4Frankly, ARM server chips have always SEEMED like they held a lot of promise but never delivered on this. If you want power efficiency per-thread, I struggle to see the value of an ARM chip vs a voltage-optimized x64 CPU. It definitely seems like there's an unaddressed market here, but I also feel like if Intel/AMD felt that Amazon Gravity or Alibaba were starting to impact their market share they'd just release TDP-…
I think cost is the main difference.
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#5Frankly, ARM server chips have always SEEMED like they held a lot of promise but never delivered on this. If you want power efficiency per-thread, I struggle to see the value of an ARM chip vs a voltage-optimized x64 CPU. It definitely seems like there's an unaddressed market here, but I also feel like if Intel/AMD felt that Amazon Gravity or Alibaba were starting to impact their market share they'd just release TDP-…
I think cost is the main difference.
What kind of cost though? Actual silicon/chip cost doesn't matter because it's amortized over so much usage. Energy efficiency matters, but more as it affects achievable density. For most server applications latency is king, which is why servers use big x64 chips with all power saving features disabled. If you have an application that isn't latency sensitive, it might make more sense to just use a big Xeon or EPYC CPU that is running in low voltage mode.
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#6CPUs don't have the same load profile as GPUs. It could be 256, 512!, 1024!! cores--unless Alibaba has one hell of an innovation on memory bandwidth & consistency, nobody at the big shops is going to care.
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#7How does this work out for security bugs?
I would assume the 128 cores share a lot of caches, so a core can leak data to other cores on the same chip.
Hence, a model where individual cores are given to different customers might be a model where these customers can steal data from each other.
Re: Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
#8How does this work out for security bugs? I would assume the 128 cores share a lot of caches, so a core can leak data to other cores on the same chip. Hence, a model where individual cores are given to different customers might be a model where these customers can steal data from each other.
So just like every other chip.