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 - Single-Threaded Performance
Single-threaded performance is important for some more real-world workloads, although for the Altra Max which advertises itself as a throughput machine for hyperscaler use, it’s probably only a very edge-case scenario metric.
We don’t expect much of the chip here, given it’s halved SLC size, and 10% lower frequencies compared to the Q80-33.
As one would think, the M128-30 doesn’t have much going for it in such a load scenario, showcasing 8-15% lower scores than the Q80-33, and falling behind most of the competitive pack, except for the 2.6GHz clocked Graviton2.
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dullard - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Far too many people mistakenly think it is AMD vs Intel. In reality it is ARM vs (AMD + Intel together).TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
In reality it's AMD VS INTEL, with ARM the red headed stepchild with 3 extra chromosomes drooling in the corner. x86 still commands 99% of the server market.DougMcC - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
And the reason is price/performance. These chips are pricey for what they deliver, and it shows in amazon instance costs. We looked at moving to graviton 2 instances in aws and even with the in-house pricing advantage there we would be losing 55+% performance for <25% price advantage.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Was/is it really that bad? Wow! I thought AWS is making a value play for their gravitons, your example suggests that isn't working so great.mode_13h - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Could be that demand is simply outstripping their supply. Amazon isn't immune from chip shortages either, you know?DougMcC - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
It was for us. Could be that there are workload issues specific to us, though as a pretty basic j2ee app it's somewhat hard for me to imagine that we are unique.lightningz71 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
It is VERY workload dependent.lemurbutton - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Graviton2 is now 50% of all new instances at AWS.DougMcC - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Not super surprising. Even with the massive loss of performance, it's still cheaper. If you don't need performance, why wouldn't you choose the cheapest thing?Wilco1 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
In most cases Graviton is not only cheaper but also significantly faster. It's easy to find various examples:https://docs.keydb.dev/blog/2020/03/02/blog-post/
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/08/05/achieving...
https://yegorshytikov.medium.com/aws-graviton-2-ar...
https://www.instana.com/blog/best-practices-for-an...