AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AmpereOne-Costs-GCC-13

[tildearrow]

Ampere, please, cheap desktop CPU that can fight M1/M2...

[coder]

Ampere, please, cheap desktop CPU that can fight M1/M2...

Not a chance. Ampere seems squarely focused on cloud.

Qualcomm/Nuvia is your best hope for something non-x86, in the foreseeable future. Won't be cheap, especially if it performs on par with Apple.

[brucethemoose]

Ampere, please, cheap desktop CPU that can fight M1/M2...

A GPU-less ARM desktop CPU is such a niche market that I dont think Qualcomm will pursue it.

I don't 100% agree with coder though, the bottom end of Qualcomm's/Ampere's server lineup might work in a desktop.


if you want a GPU heavy SoC like the M1, I can't see anyone making that work. The investment in graphics/compute compatibility would have to be be *enormous*, and again the market is small.

[brad0]

Ampere, please, cheap desktop CPU that can fight M1/M2...

Not happening. Beyond wishful thinking.

[coder]

the bottom end of Qualcomm's/Ampere's server lineup might work in a desktop.

What's this "Qualcomm/Ampere" business? Did Qualcomm buy Ampere?

As for using Ampere's CPUs in a workstation, that's nothing new. You can find a couple examples, even as far back as their eMAG CPUs. They're not cheap, however. And single-threaded performance isn't even in the same league as x86 desktops or Apple (which tildearrow listed as a requirement).

We will get ARM-based mini-PCs, though. Again, here's an example of the kind of thing we can expect:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/dev-kit/

That gets you 4x X1 cores @ 3 GHz + 4x A78 cores @ 2.4 GHz. Not to mention 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of NVMe storage. I'd hazard a guess that it might compete with NUCs from a couple generations earlier.

if you want a GPU heavy SoC like the M1, I can't see anyone making that work. The investment in graphics/compute compatibility would have to be be *enormous*, and again the market is small.

Hmm... the baseline M-series GPUs aren't really that big, are they? I wonder how well Qualcomm's Adreno could scale up. They've been chasing Apple for quite a while, so they know what they're competing against.

[Ladis]

They've been chasing Apple for quite a while, so they know what they're competing against.

Yes, they know what they are competing against and gave up.

[coder]

Yes, they know what they are competing against and gave up.

Quite the opposite. They bought Nuvia.

[terryfilch]

I'm waiting when Ampere will release CPU's with hardware acceleration for virtualization because order 80 CPU core which can run only k8s via containers is not what I want...

[brucethemoose]

What's this "Qualcomm/Ampere" business? Did Qualcomm buy Ampere?

As for using Ampere's CPUs in a workstation, that's nothing new. You can find a couple examples, even as far back as their eMAG CPUs. They're not cheap, however. And single-threaded performance isn't even in the same league as x86 desktops or Apple (which tildearrow listed as a requirement).

We will get ARM-based mini-PCs, though. Again, here's an example of the kind of thing we can expect:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/dev-kit/

That gets you 4x X1 cores @ 3 GHz + 4x A78 cores @ 2.4 GHz. Not to mention 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of NVMe storage. I'd hazard a guess that it might compete with NUCs from a couple generations earlier.


Hmm... the baseline M-series GPUs aren't really that big, are they? I wonder how well Qualcomm's Adreno could scale up. They've been chasing Apple for quite a while, so they know what they're competing against.

I mean Qualcomm and Ampere as seperate entities.

Yeah, I saw the eMAG, but they were absurdly priced testing machines :/. Hopefully they could bring the price down for future desktops.

On ST perf: Many users (especially linux users who's primary workload is compilation) would trade ST performance for tons of MT performance.

On the M1: No its not that big. But the thing is, the M series has a great gpu, and its still terrible for "desktop" GPU performance that Qualcomm would have to pursue, aka windows directx gaming and linux opengl stuff. Its niche is media processing and machine learning on OSX.

Qualcomm would be competing with Nvidia/AMD/Intel dGPUs whether they like it or not, as they cant really leverage the unified memory, power efficiency, or Metal API advantage like Apple can in those niches.