Ampere Altra Announced - Offering Up To 80 Cores Per Socket

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ampere Altra Announced - Offering Up To 80 Cores Per Socket

Ampere Computing, the ARM server start-up founded by former Intel president Renee James and staffed by many former Intel folks, is today announcing Altra as their next-generation server processor. Ampere started off with the assets of AppliedMicro's X-Gene ARMv8 IP and that turned into the Ampere's eMAG as a decent entrant into the field two years ago. But now with more resources and engineering talent under their belt, they are now preparing to ship the Ampere Altra as up to 80 cores per socket and based on Arm's latest Neoverse N1.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28933

[ms178]

It seems they don't support SVE or SVE2 extensions. At least I don't see it mentioned in their product brief.

[Britoid]

But will it run Crysis ?

[sykobee]

I think someone ran Crysis in software rendering mode on a 64-core ThreadRipper or Epyc system, and it ran, just. As this looks to have similar performance, then ... yes(ish).

[Anty]

"Ampere has yet to publish much in the way of Altra benchmarks, but from one of the numbers they did disclose during the press briefing was that for SPEC int rate performance"

It sounds like - hey there is one test we won (but we suck at most of other ones).
Especially this company is based on ex-intel guys

[willmore]

80 cores vs 64 cores and just eeking out a win in one of the easiest multi-core benchmarks? That's not much of an endorsement. The TCO graphs are notorious for BS as well as the 'T' is often not very total. Even if the processors were free, a big machine stuffed full of solid state drives and TBs of DRAM would see little improvement.

I do appreciate more entrants in the server market. It's been clear what even one competetive alternative to Intel has done for performance and performance/cost. A second should help some more. But it's too soon to say if they're competetive in any real sense. I'm quite willing to recompile the world and retune software for a completely different architecture, but that comes with different costs for different workloads. I'm lucky enough to run most of my software from well maintained open source projects. Not everyone shares similar benefits.

[boxie]

80 cores vs 64 cores and just eeking out a win in one of the easiest multi-core benchmarks?

I would like you to stop for a second and appreciate what you just said... About an ARM server thrashing Intel and just pipping AMD in a benchmark.

Sure, these are vendor numbers and we shouldn't trust them until validated, but - an ARM server going up against high end x86 and not being totally humiliated...

kinda awesome huh?

[edwaleni]

Now that Ampere has a "TM" notation all over their documents, maybe NVidia will stop using it.

[torsionbar28]

I would like you to stop for a second and appreciate what you just said... About an ARM server thrashing Intel and just pipping AMD in a benchmark.

Sure, these are vendor numbers and we shouldn't trust them until validated, but - an ARM server going up against high end x86 and not being totally humiliated...

kinda awesome huh?

It is but I wonder why they don't offer a developer board? I guess they figure these servers are for cloud providers, and the devs will do their dev work on a cloud instance?

[willmore]

I would like you to stop for a second and appreciate what you just said... About an ARM server thrashing Intel and just pipping AMD in a benchmark.

Sure, these are vendor numbers and we shouldn't trust them until validated, but - an ARM server going up against high end x86 and not being totally humiliated...

kinda awesome huh?

Oh, I did. I don't discount that--pending verification--this could be a great moment, but we've heard this song before. Each time with some highly specific benchmark under undisclosed conditions, the new contender showed up the old guard. Each time the fine print ate up all the real world performance. I remain hopeful, but I wouldn't plan my next years purchases based on what we know so far.