Better Fujitsu A64FX Support Arrives For GCC, LLVM Clang Compilers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Better Fujitsu A64FX Support Arrives For GCC, LLVM Clang Compilers

The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fujitsu-A64FX-Better-Compiler

[uid313]

That's right, the world's most powerful supercomputer, ranked #1 on Top500 supercomputer list is not an x86, nor is it a SPARC or POWER, it is an ARM!

[PerformanceExpert]

That's right, the world's most powerful supercomputer, ranked #1 on Top500 supercomputer list is not an x86, nor is it a SPARC or POWER, it is an ARM!

And unlike most other supercomputers it does not rely on GPU accelerators to reach that performance.

[wizard69]

Now if Micheal could only borrow one for testing. This is one interesting processor, it would be nice to see an affordable workstation board built around it.

[tildearrow]

Typo: can check out Fuitsu's A64FX GitHub repository for the microarchitecture manual

[sdack]

And unlike most other supercomputers it does not rely on GPU accelerators to reach that performance.

It reaches not only the highest performance, but it is one of the most power-efficient super computers at the same time, which makes it remarkable.

However, the most power-efficient system currently is a combo of AMD EPYC 7742 + NVIDIA DGX A100. The GPU accelerators still play an important role. If Nvidia has got anything to say - should their purchase of Arm go through - then we should see another leap of this magnitude.

[coder]

Does anyone know if Fujitsu plans to make these CPUs available for use outside of their supercomputers? If not, I think it's even more irrelevant than Apple's M1, aside from the fact that it's a real-world demonstration of ARM's SVE.

[coder]

It reaches not only the highest performance, but it is one of the most power-efficient super computers at the same time, which makes it remarkable.

That's mainly because systems based on 7 nm GPUs hadn't yet been built out. So, it's more a testament to the manufacturing node than ARM vs. GPU.

[coder]

Now if Micheal could only borrow one for testing. This is one interesting processor, it would be nice to see an affordable workstation board built around it.

If you've got SVE-friendly workloads, sure. Otherwise, the clockspeed is fairly low and the core count is less than Ampere Altra, not to mention that I doubt its SPECint scores are as high as the N1 cores. So, that's probably a better option for most.