Ampere Altra Max 128-Core CPU Is Priced Lower Than Flagship Xeon, EPYC CPUs

[jagger27]

Strange how low clock the 32 core model is. I can see they did it for lower TPD (only 65w), but I feel they also should offer a higher clocked one, or at least allow for overclocking. 1.7GHz is lower than what a fanless Raspberry Pi 4 can do.

It doesn't seem very strange to me. ~2W of TDP per core is pretty much unbeatable (except by the next SKU up, Q64-22, which is ~1.5W/core). Maybe it's a binning thing. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than everything else, so it seems like they're literally just dumping their garbage dies because they can. I wouldn't bother comparing it to the RaspberryPi 4. They're pretty different CPUs.

[igxqrrl]

The list prices are of course not terribly relevant for the target market, where nobody pays list. But I do like that I could spec a perfectly usable 32-core workstation at Avantek.

Though they're charging $1600 for the Q32-17

And putting together an actual usable workstation ends up at at least $10K

A Dell Poweredge R6525, with the same specs but a 24-core Epyc 7352 costs about half as much. Even with a 7F72 it's still less. Which is just to say that nobody, even individual users, pay retail on the AMD/Intel side. I really hope we can get some reasonably priced workstations with this chip. At $5K for this system I'd be a buyer. $10K+ is just too much for an end user.

[sophisticles]

While the prices listed are very attractive, the biggest obstacle these ARM offering face is all the legacy x86 software (and hardware) out there nd the fact that Intel especially has the resources to launch a price war if they feel threatened enough.

There is also this reality, the benchmarks Michael showed in the other article are terribly misleading, while the tested Intel processors did not do as well as the AMD and ARM solutions, Intel sells Xeons with built in FPGAs that for certain workloads are unbeatable and offer power consumption that neither AMD nor ARM can match (as in very low).

[PerformanceExpert]

The list prices are of course not terribly relevant for the target market, where nobody pays list. But I do like that I could spec a perfectly usable 32-core workstation at Avantek.

Though they're charging $1600 for the Q32-17

And putting together an actual usable workstation ends up at at least $10K

A Dell Poweredge R6525, with the same specs but a 24-core Epyc 7352 costs about half as much. Even with a 7F72 it's still less. Which is just to say that nobody, even individual users, pay retail on the AMD/Intel side. I really hope we can get some reasonably priced workstations with this chip. At $5K for this system I'd be a buyer. $10K+ is just too much for an end user.

According to that website only the top-end model is $10k. You can get a 1U Altra server with 32 cores and 64GB RAM for about $6000, but $8300 for the 64 core version would make a lot more sense.

A similarly configured EPYC 7742 is over $12k on broadberry.com (the 7763 would add another $1k). So Altra is cheaper at the high end, however there are no cheap low-end versions yet (a sign that yields are great).

[tildearrow]

Typo:

At the the lower end of the spectrum the introductory Ampere Altra Q32-17 goes for $800 USD.

So, $800 for a processor with too many cores and low single-threaded performance due to its 1.7GHz clock...

Why isn't there an $800 for a processor with 8 cores and 3.0GHz clock option?! There *are* applications that demand high single-threaded performance, like game servers.
Still surprising though. I was expecting it to cost $1,600...

[PerformanceExpert]

Typo:
So, $800 for a processor with too many cores and low single-threaded performance due to its 1.7GHz clock...

Why isn't there an $800 for a processor with 8 cores and 3.0GHz clock option?! There *are* applications that demand high single-threaded performance, like game servers.
Still surprising though. I was expecting it to cost $1,600...

It doesn't make much sense to sell an 80-core CPU with just 8 cores enabled... Ampere are going for throughput and perf/W on highly threaded cloud workloads. The next generation Neoverse servers should increase single-threaded perf by 50%, so those would be more suitable for what you're suggesting. However the low-end server market is full of cheap x86 silicon, so it would be more difficult to enter than at the very high end like Ampere is doing.