Benchmarking An ARM 96-Core Cavium ThunderX System

[Michael]

What's the power consumption for 96-core ThunderX at idle and under load?

Unfortunately no idea since no physical access to be able to attach a power meter.

[GraysonPeddie]

Not even a Kill-A-Watt for the whole system? I mean, you can measure it at the wall.

[edwaleni]

Not even a Kill-A-Watt for the whole system? I mean, you can measure it at the wall.

I think Michael shared that he did not have physical access to the hardware, therefore any kind of power measurements weren't available. If the box he had access to was in a datacenter, it would be even less likely he could just plug in a kill-a-watt into the PDU.

Hopefully Cavium or Gigabyte will send him a ThunderX2 demo in the near future so he can test in more detail.

[GraysonPeddie]

Ah... I was just reading through the benchmarks without reading the entire article. Thanks.

[coder]

I would assume a lack of memory bandwidth, or inefficient way for those 96 threads to access memory. I wonder how the CPU load was.

People don't think about cache coherency. ...with 96 cores, let me tell you: it matters.

I think that's a big reason why this thing manages to pull out pretty sizeable numbers in tasks with high data locality, and virtually falls on its face, elsewhere. Moar cores is not necessarily better. For memory-intensive workloads, you'd rather have more machines w/ fewer cores - even running at the same speed and with proportionally less memory bandwidth.

Speaking of which, what are the popular clustering solutions, these days? Whatever supplanted to the vaunted Beowulf clusters of yore? Like 15 years ago, you could hardly find a Linux-related thread on Slashdot where someone wouldn't mention them.