Ampere Altra Max Performance For Ubuntu Linux 22.04 vs. 23.10 vs. 24.04

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ampere Altra Max Performance For Ubuntu Linux 22.04 vs. 23.10 vs. 24.04

Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampere-altra-ubuntu-2404

[Times Two]

Great stuff Michael, as always, and nice uplift from Ubuntu 22.04. I've dipped my toes into Ubuntu, but I've long since gone back to Fedora. The 1 year support life is annoying but for me still preferrable to Ubuntu based distros.

I'm not currently in need of high capacity server/cloud processing, I was in the past and might be again in the future. I'm pretty sure that when/if that need arises I will not be dependent on x86, having endeavoured to have all my projects "machine independent" through most or all of my career in computing. Thus Ampere's success could conceivably have some (minor) bearing on my future success.

Now to the elephant in the room: Where is AmpereOne? I wish Ampere much success but the server space is an exceedingly tough nut to crack, just ask AMD who's been running circles around Intel for years. It doesn't matter how clever, brilliant even, your design is, if it's years late to the poker game it might as well not get there. Superiority in some sense is needed just to get a foot on the starting line, let alone winning the race or coming in second.

While not holding my breath: Any news of AmpereOne?

[Michael]

Now to the elephant in the room: Where is AmpereOne? I wish Ampere much success but the server space is an exceedingly tough nut to crack, just ask AMD who's been running circles around Intel for years. It doesn't matter how clever, brilliant even, your design is, if it's years late to the poker game it might as well not get there. Superiority in some sense is needed just to get a foot on the starting line, let alone winning the race or coming in second.

While not holding my breath: Any news of AmpereOne?

No idea where AmpereOne is... Availability still seems scarce. No review samples offered to me and when I was last chatting with Patrick at STH he had no ideas/leads either on AmpereOne review access.

Even last time I had a call with Ampere Computing toward the end of last summer, they said they were going to soon start blogging more about AmpereOne benchmarks once they could run their own internal benchmarks against Bergamo... Guessing Bergamo was performing better or something as still haven't seen much data from Ampere Computing yet with other AmpereOne benchmarks besides some select figures they posted a while ago.

[69Y69]

No idea where AmpereOne is... Availability still seems scarce.

Yeah, this is a very odd situation.

Back in Sep 2023 Oracle announced AmpereOne-based instances called "OCI Compute A2". Yet, there is still no mention about the A2 at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/.

[Michael]

Yeah, this is a very odd situation.

Back in Sep 2023 Oracle announced AmpereOne-based instances called "OCI Compute A2". Yet, there is still no mention about the A2 at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/.

Yep that's another odd one I've been waiting on as well to test if not getting any hardware access but still no luck finding A2 either.

[stiiixy]

In the meantime, what kind of benefits does one get from utilising a different hardware architecture? Could it theoretically be more secure if that was your goal? Or process more spreadsheet calculations faster than the same software on x86 or RISC? Maybe scales higter for higher low priority instance numbers, for people like me just wanting a simple file archive.

Hypotheticals, but I've never actually delved in to that level of cloud provision and am curious about the pros and cons of each architecture and people's end user experience.