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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Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
M112-30 in the table on first page says 96 cores?Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
That was a typo.Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
I'm glad we agreenandnandnand - Thursday, October 7, 2021 - link
Let's all run out and buy the $800 32-core.mode_13h - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Add in platform costs and it's not going to look like much of a bargain compared with a Threadripper or Xeon W-3300 system.mode_13h - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Of course, if you happen to need specifically an ARM-based workstation, I'm not aware of any better option than Altra.Brutalizer - Sunday, October 10, 2021 - link
The old SPARC T8 cpu with 32 cores, is still almost faster than all these cpus. Here in the SPECjbb2015, a single cpu achieves 153.500 max, and 90.000 crit.https://blogs.oracle.com/bestperf/specjbb2015:-spa...
Wilco1 - Sunday, October 10, 2021 - link
Those are results based on weeks/months of tuning, so not at all comparable with this review (the same is true for SPEC scores). In your link a 1S 8180 does 84100 max-jOPS, while the faster 8280 gets 81700 in this review. Similarly the best critical-jOPS is 62600 for the 8180 while the 8280 gets just 47900.Sudharshan Anbarasu - Sunday, October 17, 2021 - link
How about Monero Mining performance...Since $(cache) plays major role in x86 platform, curious to know how it works in Arm architecture.