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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mode_13h - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
> x86 still commands 99% of the server market.Depends on what you consider the "server market", but AWS is very rapidly switching over. Others will follow.
Lots of cloud compute just depends on density and power-efficiency. And here's where ARM has a real advantage.
Wilco1 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
According to https://www.itjungle.com/2021/09/13/the-cacophony-... Arm server revenue has been 4-5% over the last few quarters.schujj07 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Anything under 10% market share in the server world is basically considered a niche player. Right now AMD is over 10% so they are finally seen as an actual player in the market.Spunjji - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Pointing at current market share that resulted from a lack of viable ARM competition isn't a great argument for your prediction that ARM will not gain market share, especially when you're being presented with evidence of viable ARM competition.mode_13h - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
> Before AMD can disrupt Intel in the server,*before* ? This is already happening! You can clearly see it in AMD's server marketshare, as well as the price structure of Ice Lake.
> And now Intel is coming back with Saphire Rapids. Doesn't look good for AMD.
AMD has Genoa, V-Cache, and who knows what else in the pipeline. Oh, and they can also build an ARM core just as good as anyone (with the possible exceptions of Apple and Nuvia/Qualcomm).
yetanotherhuman - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Not even in slight agreement. Different architecture.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Thanks Andrei, great analysis! IMO, the biggest problem Ampere and other firms that develop server CPUs based on ARM designs is that their natural customers - large, cloud-type providers - pretty much all have their own, in-house designed ARM-based CPUs, and won't buy thousands of third party CPUs unless they do something their own can't do, or nowhere near as well. AWS, Google, MS, and Apple still buy x86 CPUs from Intel or AMD because there is a customer demand for those instances, but also try to shift as much as they can to their own, home-grown ARM server systems. In this regard, has anyone heard any updates about the ARM designs supposedly in development at MS? Maybe Ampere can get themselves bought out by them?name99 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
“own house-designed ARM-based CPU’s”?We obviously have Graviton. Apple seem a reasonable bet at some point. Maybe a large Chinese player.
Do we have any evidence (as opposed to hypotheses and rumors) of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or most of China? Or other smaller but still large players like Yandex or Cloudflare?
Sivar - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
This is a proper old-school deep CPU review.vegemeister - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Text says Intel Xeon 8380 is running at 205 W power limit, but the table says 270 W. Which is it? I assume 270 W like ARK says?