Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne Server With R13SPD Motherboard

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne Server With R13SPD Motherboard

One of the interesting highlights of September was finally having our hands on an AmpereOne server! After years of being eager to test Ampere Computing's next-generation AArch64 server processors, Ampere sent over their 192-core flagship server processor for a few weeks of testing. The review server was comprised of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship model within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR 2U server.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/supermicro-ampereone-server

[stormcrow]

For those that are architecture agnostic/flexible there's also going to be direct cost/performance comparisons with AWS Graviton for specific use cases. The high core, high thread count systems are starting to remind me somewhat of SPARC Niagara systems. They sacrificed single core performance for being able to parallelize and handle multiple configured computation domains at the same time extremely well. They weren't just multicore and threaded like modern x86, they had many threads per core, not just 2 along with the built in ability to logically divide the hardware into independent domains. It's taking 20 years to make that circle back to high thread count and a ... (very) poor man's version of virtual machine domains.

[chithanh]

It's taking 20 years to make that circle back to high thread count and a ... (very) poor man's version of virtual machine domains.

Is it? Niagara principally had 8 threads per core and could switch between them in a single clock cycle. As long as at least one thread was not blocked by memory access or a branch (or FPU access in the T1), it remained 100% efficient. This is not the case with AmpereOne.

About SMT8, that was also brought in 2016 to IBM POWER8.

[DanaG]

I'd like to know if the AMDGPU driver for Navi GPUs will load properly on it without any patches, rather than going kaboom like it does with my LX2160A.

Though, even if it works, I don't have a use for something that big and likely loud.