Ampere Altra Performance Shows It Can Compete With - Or Even Outperform - AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon

[cb88]

Very impressive.
ARM is beginning to kick ass.
Can't wait to get a laptop with 256 cores
The future is great

You mean compete with CPUs launched August 2019... EPYC Milan is right around the corner also.

Also the margins on this chip are probalby not good compared to EPYC as it's a big monolithic die (which does contribute to it's performance I imagine but also will push up the price of the chip).

[cb88]

You can never ever never ever.....ever....undervalue power efficiency going forward. It is a HUGE component of the cost of doing business for the big cloud players....Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Also for the Supercomputer world. Billions of billions of watts of power are used every day, 24/7 by all of these guys and they have to pay for it....and increasingly find other means of powering these compute monsters that don't rely on fossil fuels. That costs them 100s of millions of dollars per year. That is a direct drain on profit. ANYTHING these guys can do to decrease costs but still give them the compute power needed for the tasks at hand is job number 1.

ARM is the solution for this. And they increasingly know this.

x86 has now been shown to be a complete disaster and failure at scaling small while increasing compute power per watt.

x86 is now showing to be a failure at scaling up compute power without becoming the main cost of your power bill.

And x86 has been shown to be a failure in incorporating AI and ML into the CPU wafer itself.

ARM has conquered all three of the above metrics.

The Age of ARM is here. x86 is now legacy.

This is dead wrong, this chip is performing basically identically to what a monolithic version of EPYC would while also having higher cost to manufacture.... this chip is available now, but EPYC 7742 has been on the market for over a year, and Milan is about to launch, monolithic server chips even ARM chips are old hat at this point. Also there is the rumors around Milan that it has the same increases as Zen 3 on the desktop, high IPC and higher clocks.

The idea that the ARM architecture is more energy efficient has been laughable for about a decade now, you need to implement all of the power hungry architectural features that x86 has to performa at this level and the instruction set for ARM is just as ugly as x86 is at this point.

The problem with your statement is ARM doesnt' scale any better than x86 does.... it scales *LOWER* but it doesn't scale higher.

[AmericanLocomotive]

Jumbotron,

ARM is a serious threat to x86 dominance, no doubt. But there's a lot of hyperbole in your post. x86 is definitely getting beat up, but I wouldn't call it out yet. x86 has made tremendous strides in efficiency within the past 3 years after stagnating for a long time, largely thanks to advancements by AMD. (...and a lot of the stagnation due to Intel's process failures). These strides have been made at both the low, and the high end.

At the high-end, Zen 3 desktop parts for example offers about ~24% improved perf/watt compared to Zen 2 desktop parts which already offered a massive ~75% perf/watt increase over Zen 1 parts. That Zen 2 > 3 efficiency gain is purely architectural, too. Zen 4 will be on a new node, and will yield node and architectural efficiency gains.

On the low end, we now have 8-core mobile parts that are offering literally double the perf/watt of last year's 4c mobile parts. Not quite ready for a tablet, but still huge gains nonetheless.

As far as x86 being a failure incorporating AI and ML - how can you say that when it hasn't even been tried yet? With nvidia having monstrous AI/ML accelerators available on the desktop side, it hasn't been a high priority for x86 chip vendors.

Like I said, x86 definitely has an up-hill battle, but there is fierce competition. It will be interesting to see what Zen 4 chips on 5nm bring.

[tildearrow]

Wake me up when you release a 4GHz ARM chip that outperforms x86 at x264...

[jo-erlend]

Billions of billions of watts of power are used every day, 24/7 by all of these guys and they have to pay for it....

Hehe. «In 2018, world total electricity final consumption reached 22 315 TWh» -- IEA.org.

[Space Heater]

Frankly I think it's insulting to the architects to pretend that the choice of ISA is what is primarily driving improvements in efficiency and performance.

[brad0]

They already have with M1. Wait until they release their 16-32 Core CPU for the iMac and the desktop PowerMac.

Clearly they have not. 4 != 80 / 160. Even with 32 cores 32 != 80 / 160. Fail at basic math.

[coder]

You can get ... good energy efficiency with Intel.

... with AMD ... you get boned on power draw.

lol wut?

AMD completely pwns Intel on power efficiency. The power consumption graphs are misleading because AMD has 128 cores compared with Intel's 56. And if you look at the timed LLVM compilation, AMD even managed lower peak and mean power draw, even while still posting up the best results!

Intel's main selling point against the 7002-series is single-thread performance. However, that's about to disappear once AMD's Zen3 EPYC starts shipping (except for those few workloads that can really use AVX-512).

Or you can get all of it with ARM.

Really? So, what does Altra cost? And it still lost quite a few of the benchmarks, even before we consider whether there was any bias involved in the benchmark selection.

Altra is based on the same N1 cores as Amazon's Graviton2, that launched nearly a year ago. Maybe it's on a better 7 nm process, but the N2 and V1 cores are the ones that could seriously threaten AMD and Intel.

[Dukenukemx]

They already have with M1. Wait until they release their 16-32 Core CPU for the iMac and the desktop PowerMac.

The Age of ARM is here. X86 tech is now legacy.

You can get wildly ripped off on price but get good energy efficiency with Intel.

You can get better value and bang for your computing buck with AMD but you get boned on power draw.

Or you can get all of it with ARM.

I've heard this before with X86 being legacy. TheAmpere Ultra isn't a bad performer but it didn't exactly win the majority of those benchmarks. Also keep in mind that in a server environment the amount of power you save with the Ampere Ultra is negligible when you stick hundreds of gigs of ram and other components that eat power. There's no power consumption tests done with this, at least nothing I can Google, but anandtech does say that each core on the Ampere eats 2.6 W while each core on AMD"s Rome is 3 W. Then you have cost since not only you need the hardware but you have to retool all the software for ARM.

I'm not sure in ARM's future with RISC-V but x86 isn't done yet. In order for ARM to have any future beyond mobile devices then we need a desktop ARM machine so people can learn to work with it. I don't mean RPI or cell phones either. This is where I believe Nvidia will step up and bring ARM to the desktop

[Dukenukemx]

Like I said, x86 definitely has an up-hill battle, but there is fierce competition. It will be interesting to see what Zen 4 chips on 5nm bring.

A lot of people overlook that Apple's M1 is made with 5nm, and not 7nm like AMD and Intel is not even at 10nm. Also the mobile chips AMD has is really outdated, even for their tech. The Ryzen 4000 series is based on Zen2 not Zen3, and their graphics is Vega, which is like 4 year old graphics. If AMD makes mobile chips with 5nm based on Zen3, and uses RDNA2 for graphics then it'll be Apple that'll have an uphill battle. Assuming people who buy Apple products ever consider buying other products. Intel is very behind and they could fix their problems by using someone else's manufacturing process. They're also working on graphics which is yet to be seen how that performs.