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Ampere Altra Announced - Offering Up To 80 Cores Per Socket

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  • #21
    "But now with more resources and engineering talent under their belt". Wow, they've really taken the concept of failing forward to a whole new level. I kid, I kid.

    What's with the hate against AMD's bulldozer? I still run a FX-8150. Sure, it's not really worth the electricity it consumes, but if I changed it, I'd also have to buy new ram, new motherboard, etc. One of the first chip on the market to iommu, full passthrough capability, great virtualization chip and accepts basic ECC ram. It's really a classic.

    And just like the bulldozer, I hear this Altra chip is great with INT but not that good with FP. From anandtech "Ampere didn’t provide similar numbers for SPEC2017_fp, because the company states that the SoC has been developed with INT workloads in mind."



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    • #22
      Originally posted by willmore View Post
      Unless you're renting out cores and charge the same for all cores, I don't know of a time this would be true. You can always have one core do two jobs, but you can't always have two cores do one job faster. Given 2 cores at speed 1 or 1 core at speed 2, you're a fool to pick the 2 cores.
      this works both ways - you can't get half of core when fast core is faster than you need

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      • #23
        Originally posted by AndyChow View Post

        I hear this Altra chip is great with INT but not that good with FP. From anandtech "Ampere didn’t provide similar numbers for SPEC2017_fp, because the company states that the SoC has been developed with INT workloads in mind."

        Fortunately Ampere is much more upfront and is not afraid of some benchmarks like Cavium is with ThunderX2.

        They gladly send out units for press kickoffs, whereas Cavium hides in the shadows and only allows review units where they know they will only get good press.

        If a company wants to market to the Xeon/Epyc crowd, then you gotta have the balls to let it get tested. That means everything...the good, the bad and the ugly.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by AndyChow View Post
          And just like the bulldozer, I hear this Altra chip is great with INT but not that good with FP. From anandtech "Ampere didn’t provide similar numbers for SPEC2017_fp, because the company states that the SoC has been developed with INT workloads in mind."
          Arm seems to have been focusing on integer performance for a while.

          IIRC even some older (2015) ARM chips are pretty competitive with Zen for integer division performance.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by pal666 View Post
            this works both ways - you can't get half of core when fast core is faster than you need
            Have you never heard of multitasking? We've been using fractional cores for decades.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by willmore View Post

              Unless you're renting out cores and charge the same for all cores, I don't know of a time this would be true. You can always have one core do two jobs, but you can't always have two cores do one job faster. Given 2 cores at speed 1 or 1 core at speed 2, you're a fool to pick the 2 cores. The only exception may be latency sensitive jobs or when dealing with realtime activities--not likely something you'd see machine like this used for.
              Well given your example yes, but consider 2 cores at the speed of 1.2 and 1 core at the speed of 2 for example... 2x1.2=2.4, and 1x2=2.0
              Also 10 cores at speed 1 beats 8 cores at speed 1.2 if the workload is parallelized. 10x1=10, 8x1.2=8=9.6

              http://www.dirtcellar.net

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              • #27
                Originally posted by waxhead View Post

                Well given your example yes, but consider 2 cores at the speed of 1.2 and 1 core at the speed of 2 for example... 2x1.2=2.4, and 1x2=2.0
                Also 10 cores at speed 1 beats 8 cores at speed 1.2 if the workload is parallelized. 10x1=10, 8x1.2=8=9.6
                If work parallelized that well, then you would be right. But it so rarely does. Even embarrasingly parallel tasks end up fighting over some resource--memory I/O, heat dissipation. Of course, you pick the processor that is better for your workload. Amdahl always comes in to take his cut after all.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by willmore View Post

                  If work parallelized that well, then you would be right. But it so rarely does. Even embarrasingly parallel tasks end up fighting over some resource--memory I/O, heat dissipation. Of course, you pick the processor that is better for your workload. Amdahl always comes in to take his cut after all.
                  Absolutely , parallelizing even simple tasks can be surprisingly difficult and with more cores you got more overhead for simply managing the darn thing, cache locality and that kind of stuff plays a huge role , but as I/O get more and more parallelized with blk-mq and when filesystems such as btrfs (eventually) scales to utilize CPU's and multiple disks better then all in all more (slightly) slower cores may be a bit benefit compared to a superfast single thread performance. It all depends on your workload of course. Case closed

                  http://www.dirtcellar.net

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by waxhead View Post
                    It all depends on your workload of course. Case closed
                    Exactly. People, if it really matters (you're going to make some kind of financial commitment), *test your own application*. Don't just follow some benchmarks at a website--no matter how much you like it.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by willmore View Post
                      80 cores vs 64 cores and just eeking out a win in one of the easiest multi-core benchmarks? That's not much of an endorsement. The TCO graphs are notorious for BS as well as the 'T' is often not very total. Even if the processors were free, a big machine stuffed full of solid state drives and TBs of DRAM would see little improvement.

                      I do appreciate more entrants in the server market. It's been clear what even one competetive alternative to Intel has done for performance and performance/cost. A second should help some more. But it's too soon to say if they're competetive in any real sense. I'm quite willing to recompile the world and retune software for a completely different architecture, but that comes with different costs for different workloads. I'm lucky enough to run most of my software from well maintained open source projects. Not everyone shares similar benefits.
                      You don't have to recompile for the arm architecture. Almost all open source projects have ready-made arm architecture versions. The arm server is not a novelty either. It started to appear in 2013.

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