The Ampere Altra Max Review: Pushing it to 128 Cores per Socket
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 7, 2021 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Servers
- Arm
- Neoverse N1
- Ampere
- Altra Max
SPEC - Multi-Threaded Performance - Aggregate
Switching over to the aggregate geomean scores for the suites, we see a more moderate view of the generational improvements of the Altra Max chip:
In the integer suite, the M128-30 only sees a 6-10% advantage over the Q80-33 depending on the 2- or 1-socket scores. It’s a smidge faster than the EPYC 7763, but there’s more considerations to have than just the total scores.
In the floating-point suite, the system also sees rather lacklustre figures of only 3-4% advantage of the M128-30 over the Q80-33.
The general problem of these scores showcase is a trend of the new Altra Max design, and that is that it’s not as general-purpose as we tend to expect for a CPU. Even though we see regular large workload gains of 30-45%, the way the suite is designed for the “base” scores is that we’re running all workloads with the same number of instances, something which at 128 cores on the Altra Max inevitably leads to performance regressions in anything that is more demanding on memory and caches.
When we first heard of the Altra Max only featuring a 16MB cache, we were quite pessimistic of this aspect of the design, well – that was also true of the 32MB cache of the 80-core Altra, where performance in some workloads just can not scale well beyond a certain core count due to the shared resource contention.
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lemurbutton - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Before AMD can disrupt Intel in the server, Ampere has disrupted AMD. And now Intel is coming back with Saphire Rapids. Doesn't look good for AMD.Teckk - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
AMD also has upcoming products, same as other companies :) Competition is good.schujj07 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Most likely Sapphire Rapids will only get Intel to Epyc Milan or a little past there. Overall ICL Xeon only caught Intel up to Epyc Rome. Initial tests on Milan were good, showing 5-7% better performance which isn't bad, however, it wasn't like what we saw on the desktop side. Turns out the benchmarks were run on a reference platform that AMD hacked to allow 3rd Gen support. Once benchmarks were done on Milan on platforms designed for 3rd Gen the performance jumped by another 10% or more. Basically that put ICL 15-17% behind Epyc Milan and SPR is only supposed to get about 19% more performance.mode_13h - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
> Initial tests on Milan were good, showing 5-7% better performance which isn't badInitial tests were flawed, due to non-production hardware/firmware. Check out their update:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16778/amd-epyc-mila...
schujj07 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
"Initial tests were flawed, due to non-production hardware/firmware."I basically said that in my initial comment.
"Turns out the benchmarks were run on a reference platform that AMD hacked to allow 3rd Gen support. Once benchmarks were done on Milan on platforms designed for 3rd Gen the performance jumped by another 10% or more. "
GreenReaper - Saturday, October 9, 2021 - link
Your initial comment was too long, he didn't read that far before hitting reply.whatthe123 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
icelake is not great in general. it was an improvement over 14nm but the core scaling was not there and their 10nm was still struggling to hit competitive boost clocks. I don't think the uplift they saw between 14nm and icelake reflects sapphire rapids at all considering the major design changes and improved node, but if it does I don't see how sapphire rapids would compete with milan at a lower core count. If its competing with milan then the per-core performance and MT scaling has seen a huge uplift compared to icelake.schujj07 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Had ICL come out on time people would have been more impressed. The problem that ICL has is since it was soooooo late Intel had to squeeze every ounce of performance out of SKL. Overall ICL is just a short term platform but the performance comparison to SPR.mode_13h - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
> Had ICL come out on time people would have been more impressed.Depends on what you mean by "on time". If it had come in place of Cascade Lake, then probably. However, if it still followed Cascade Lake, then the clockspeed drop and strong competition from Rome & comparison with Graviton 2 are still unflattering.
If Ice Lake had notched up the clockspeed ladder *and* launched in place of Cascade Lake, then it would've been a very solid entry.
Anyway, I'm sure Intel is still selling every one they can make. People are quick to point out how AMD benefited from Intel's process woes, but the past 5 years' demand surge has provided Intel a very nice cushion. They basically couldn't have picked a better time to falter.
schujj07 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
I believe that ICL was supposed to be 2nd Gen Scalable. When Intel found that it wasn't ready, they released Cascade Lake. Even worse was needing to release Cooper Lake for 4-8S systems in 2H 2020.