55th TOP500 Supercomputer List Topped By Arm-Based Fujitsu A64FX

[jabl]

And once you get one, it will probably need to run some domain specific Linux distro image because the ARM world cannot decide on an agnostic way to boot the darn things. They can learn a lot from the late 80's PC BIOS

That's a problem for embedded systems. ARM servers follow the ARM SBSA which has ACPI and UEFI just like the x86 platform.

[andyprough]

The secret is not ARM - it's soy. The Fugaku uses "Tofu Interconnect" to keep the 158,000+ cores talking.

[piotrj3]

Well suprising part is that Sunnit with Nvidia voltas+Power9 is still more energy efficient then those ARM CPUs, especially considering Power9 is not specially energy efficient.

[wizard69]

And once you get one, it will probably need to run some domain specific Linux distro image because the ARM world cannot decide on an agnostic way to boot the darn things. They can learn a lot from the late 80's PC BIOS

It would be nice if Apple could manage to zeta standard here or other ARM chips. You are absolutely right, as long as we need chip specific Linux versions ARMis doomed on the desktop.

news like this and Apples announcement is good though as it highlights what is possible with the ARM architecture. It wears on me when I hear nonsense about ARM can’t do this or that. I’d love to see ARM based hardwAre displace the old X86 stuff.

[HadrienG]

Well suprising part is that Sunnit with Nvidia voltas+Power9 is still more energy efficient then those ARM CPUs, especially considering Power9 is not specially energy efficient.

Personally, I kind of see this the other way around: it's quite impressive that a system with a largely homogeneous general-purpose CPU configuration is able to achieve about the same power efficiency as a CPU+GPU system, which should be much more annoying to program as there are things like the PCIe latency/bandwidth bottleneck, split memory hierarchies, and an asynchronous offload programming model (and thus asynchronous error reporting) to take care of.

But I'm waiting for feedback from people who actually programmed the thing before making a definite opinion on the programming model simplicity front. Intel's Xeon Phi also promised to offer a significant programming model simplification wrt to hybrid CPU+GPU architectures, and those who actually tried to program it know how that turned out: it was so hard to get performance out of the thing that in the end GPUs kept the programming ergonomics crown.

[tuxd3v]

Fujistu has more than half a century of success stories, A64FX is just another success story..
It Is known, that a supercomputer will be built in the US, with A64FX..

[tuxd3v]

news like this and Apples announcement is good though as it highlights what is possible with the ARM architecture. It wears on me when I hear nonsense about ARM can’t do this or that. I’d love to see ARM based hardwAre displace the old X86 stuff.

well, ARM arch has been more tuned to mobile devices than desktop..
that's why you don't see it in the desktop space, also intel tries to bully any vendor if they threaten his business..

Even AMD( that operates in x86), has problems to put devices in the market imagine a nonx86 on the desktop.. it would be needed agreements between governments, and so on, even then intel has a very large network..

But its true that x86 is a doomed arch full of bugs an a very complex implementation due to the history of it..

[cl333r]

Where can I get an affordable 24-core ARM board? The most of them are only 8-core.

Where can I get an affordable Ferrari? The most of them are only Mercedes of BMW.

[coder]

Where can I get an affordable 24-core ARM board? The most of them are only 8-core.

Not sure what you consider affordable, but here's something that's at least decent (if populated by a previous-generation CPU).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15733...64-workstation

I feel like I've been asking for an affordable ARM board with decent performance for a very long time now. Unfortunately about the best you'll find won't have all the things you'd normally want on an actual motherboard.

Okay, so what "things you'd normally want" does that lack?

And once you get one, it will probably need to run some domain specific Linux distro image because the ARM world cannot decide on an agnostic way to boot the darn things.

No.

From the article:

the one thing that sets the eMag Workstation apart from most other Arm-based embedded systems in the market, is the fact that it’s an SBSA (Server Base System Architecture) compliant system.

What SBSA mandates as a standard, is for a vendor to design the hardware in a certain way such that the CPU, the system timers, interrupts and PCIe handling operates in such a way, that any SBSA compliant operating system image would be able to boot on it.

[coder]

Well suprising part is that Summit with Nvidia voltas+Power9 is still more energy efficient then those ARM CPUs, especially considering Power9 is not specially energy efficient.

Exactly. It can't even beat 2017 tech, on power-efficiency grounds. Just wait until it goes up against a Rome/A100 equivalent.