Assessing Cavium's ThunderX2: The Arm Server Dream Realized At Last
by Johan De Gelas on May 23, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Enterprise
- SoCs
- Enterprise CPUs
- ARMv8
- Cavium
- ThunderX
- ThunderX2
What We Can Conclude: So Far
Wrapping things up, our SPECInt analyses show that the ThunderX2 cores still has some weaknesses. Our first impression is that branch intensive code – especially in combination with regular L3-cache misses (high DRAM latency) – run quite a bit slower. So there will be corner cases where the ThunderX2 is not the best choice.
However, other than some niche markets, we are pretty confident that the ThunderX2 will be a solid performer. For example, the performance measurements done by our colleagues at the University of Bristol confirm our suspicion that memory intensive HPC workloads such as OpenFoam (CFD) and NAMD.run really well on the ThunderX2
From the early server software testing we have done so far, we can only be pleasantly surprised. The performance-per-dollar of the ThunderX2 in both Java Server (SPECJbb) and Big Data processing is – right now – by far the best in the server market. We have to retest AMD's EPYC server CPU and a Gold version of the current generation (Skylake) Xeon to be absolutely sure, but delivering 80-90% of the performance of the 8176 at one fourth of the cost is going to very hard to beat.
As an added benefit to Cavium and the ThunderX2, here in 2018 the Arm Linux ecosystem is now mature; specialized Linux kernels and other tools are no longer necessary. You just install Ubuntu Server, Red Hat, or Suse, and you can automate your deployments and software installation from the standard repositories. That is a massive improvement compared to what we experienced back when the ThunderX was launched. Back in 2016, simply installing from the regular Ubuntu repositories could cause problems.
So all in all, the ThunderX2 is a very potent contender. It might even be more dangerous to AMD's EPYC than to Intel's Skylake Xeon thanks to the fact that both Cavium and AMD are competing for much of the same pool of customers considering switching away from Intel. This is because the customers who have invested in expensive enterprise software (Oracle, SAP) are less sensitive to cost on the hardware side, so they are much less likely to change to a new hardware platform. And those people have been investing the past 5 years in Intel as it was the only option.
That in turn means that those who are more agile and cost sensitive, such as hosting and cloud providers, will now be able to choose an Arm server CPU alternative with an excellent performance-per-dollar ratio. And with HP, Cray, Pengiun computing, Gigabyte, Foxconn, and Inventec all offering systems based upon the ThunderX2, there isn't a shortage of quality vendors.
In short, the ThunderX2 is the first SoC that is able to compete with Intel and AMD in the general purpose server CPU market. And that is a pleasant surprise: at last, an Arm server solution that delivers!
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imaheadcase - Sunday, May 27, 2018 - link
Yah i tried that for a bit, it worked ok. But was not foolproof, it missed some stuff.repoman27 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Just to provide a counter point, this article made my day. And that’s coming entirely from intellectual curiosity—I don’t plan on deploying any servers with these chips in the near future. I always enjoy Johan’s writing, and was really looking forward to seeing how ThunderX2 would stack up. Many people are convinced that ARM is really only suitable in low power / mobile scenarios, but this is the chip that may finally prove otherwise. That has significant ramifications for the entire industry (including the consumer space), especially when you consider that Cavium could put out a TSMC 10nm or even 7nm shrink of ThunderX2 before Intel can get off of 14nm.HStewart - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
This does not proved that ARM is suitable in higher end space - look at the core specific speed - it extremely low compare to Intel and AMD server chips. Keep in mind it takes 128 total cores - running at 4SMT system. And what about other operations - what about Virtual Machine situation - where you have many virtual x86 machines on VMWare server,How about high end mathematical and vector logic?
It does seem like ARM can run more threads - but maybe Intel or AMD has never had the need to
I think this latest Core battle is silly - I think it really not the number of cores you have but combination of type and speed of cores along with number of cores.
Wilco1 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
It certainly does prove that Arm can do high end servers - the results clearly show IPC/GHz is very close on SPECINT. Base clock speeds are the same as the Intel cores, and that's the speed the server runs at when not idle. But there are more cores as you say, so who will win is obvious.Now imagine a next-gen 7nm version before Intel manages 10nm. Not a pretty picture, right?
HStewart - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Ok I have learn to agree to disagree with some peopleCan this server run the VMWare server
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003882
The answer is no - just one example - many more,
On 10nm - it not number that matters - it technology behind it - Intel supposely has a i3 and Y based for CannonLake coming this year - probably more.
Wilco1 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
There are plenty of VMs for Arm, so virtualization is not an issue.10nm will be behind 7nm even if it ends up as originally promised and not using relaxed rules to become viable for volume production.
ZolaIII - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
When optimized for SIMD NEON extension things changed dramatically. All tho NEON isn't exactly the best SIMD never the less number's speak for them self.https://blog.cloudflare.com/neon-is-the-new-black/
Tho Centriq is a bit pricier, bit overly slower than this but main point is it whose built on comparable lithography to current Intel's 14nm. So you get cheaper hardware, which can be packaged tighter & will consume much less power while being compatible regarding the performance. Triple win situation (initial cost, cost of ownership and scaling) but it still isn't turn key one whit isn't crucial for big vendor server farms anyway.
name99 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
ARM (and this particular chip) aren't trying to solve every problem in the world. They're trying to offer a better (cheaper) solution for a PARTICULAR subset of customers.If you think such customers don't exist, then why do you think Intel has such a wide range of Xeons, including eg all those Xeon Silvers that only turbo up to 3GHz? Or Xeon Gold's that max out at 2.8GHz?
lmcd - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
Second page: supports SR-IOV, which is important for KVM and Xen. If you're not aware, Xen and KVM are powerful virtualization solutions that cover the feature set of VMWare quite nicely.HStewart - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
"I really think Anandtech needs to branch into different websites. Its very strange and unappealing to certain users to have business/consumer/random reviews/phone info all bunched together."I different in this - I don't think AnandTech should concentrate on just gaming in focus - this is rather old school - I am not sure about mobile phones in the mess of all this
But comparing ARM cpu's to Intel/AMD is interesting subject. It basically RISC vs CISC discussion - yes RISC can do operations quicker in some cases - but by definition of the architecture they are Reduce in what they do. Fox example it would take RISC a ton of instructions to executed a single AVX style operation.
This article is closest I have seen in comparing ARM vs x86 base machines - but even though I see some holes - it comes close - but having just be Linux based leaves out why people purchase such machine - I think Virtual Machine server is huge - but like everything else on the internet that is just an opinion