OpenMandriva Speeding Up Their AArch64 Linux Development With Ampere Altra

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenMandriva Speeding Up Their AArch64 Linux Development With Ampere Altra

Ampere Computing has provided a 160-core Ampere Altra server with 128GB of RAM to the OpenMandriva project to help in speeding up their AArch64 Linux packaging and development efforts...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenMandriva-Ampere-Altra

[cl333r]

When I added an NVMe SSD to my PC and switched the dev projects to it they started building a lot faster than I expected, e.g. the QtCreator build time went down from ~40-45 minutes to ~20-25.

[milkylainen]

So it beats a 16-core Threadripper?
With comparable power consumption, the dual 80-core (160 cores) monster is faster... in some applications?

Because that's the only reference I found.
Which also means that single thread performance is rubbish?

[numacross]

So it beats a 16-core Threadripper?
With comparable power consumption, the dual 80-core (160 cores) monster is faster... in some applications?

Because that's the only reference I found.
Which also means that single thread performance is rubbish?

AnandTech did a detailed review of the 80c and 128c models. Generally it's competitive with Zen 2 and Cascade Lake:

[schmidtbag]

The way I understand it, Ampere Altra is meant to be responsive and efficient, but not necessarily fast. Think things like web servers, where you don't necessarily need a lot of processing power or fancy instructions, you just need high availability so tasks aren't queued. Epyc can obviously do the same thing but it's probably more expensive and power hungry.

[mdedetrich]

The way I understand it, Ampere Altra is meant to be responsive and efficient, but not necessarily fast. Think things like web servers, where you don't necessarily need a lot of processing power or fancy instructions, you just need high availability so tasks aren't queued. Epyc can obviously do the same thing but it's probably more expensive and power hungry.

Its actually much more power hungry and expensive for somewhat marginally better single core performance.

I don't think a lot of people realize that its ARM server that AMD is scared of, not Intel. Intel is easy pickings/low hanging fruit however the big $$$ is in datacenter/enterprise/server and offerings like Ampere and Graviton is really strong competition against Epyc.

[PerformanceExpert]

AnandTech did a detailed review of the 80c and 128c models. Generally it's competitive with Zen 2 and Cascade Lake:

The single-threaded performance of Altra is 88% of AMD's fastest server, the EPYC 7763. It gets 94% multithreaded, all at far lower power and cost. Altra Max does even better. That's not just being competitive, that's blowing away the competition.

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[numacross]

The single-threaded performance of Altra is 88% of AMD's fastest server, the EPYC 7763. It gets 94% multithreaded, all at far lower power and cost. Altra Max does even better. That's not just being competitive, that's blowing away the competition.

7763 is not the fastest ST EPYC, it's the F-series as shown on the graph I quoted. My comment was only about the ST performance of Altra relative to competitors.

The ST performance of the 128c model is significantly lower due to its construction (lower clocks and halved cache). When compared to the 64c 7763, which is its direct competitor in MT, M128's ST is at 74% (62% FP), and against 72F3 it's 64% (54% FP).

What is more there are 3D V-Cache models now available that Phoronix's test shown to uplift performance by up to 100%. However that is heavily workload dependent, and AnandTech has not tested an EPYC like that so we don't have nice graphs to compare to Altra, sadly.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that we can get competition in this market beside the x86 duopoly and I'm looking forward to the next iteration of Altra as well as AMD's efforts using the same method to increase core count - Bergamo is rumored to have halved L3 cache. As for Intel... maybe Sapphire Rapids will come out eventually