Ampere Altra Max 128-Core CPU Is Priced Lower Than Flagship Xeon, EPYC CPUs

From our Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux performance preview earlier this week, one of the questions a number of readers were wondering about and a question I also still had open was on the Altra Max pricing... I've now received the current price list and actually comes in much lower than expected for a 128-core CPU in 2021.

The Ampere Altra Max M128-30 with 128 physical (N1) cores was offering great performance against Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" in workloads that can efficiently scale out to 128 or 256 threads (in 2P configuration) and are well optimized for AArch64. More tests are on the way while now having the current price list in hand as of today and rather surprised how competitive it is on that front.

The Ampere Altra Max M128-30 is listed for $5,800 USD. That flagship Ampere processor is listed well below the current top-end Intel and AMD CPUs. The M128-30 was easily competing with the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 which carries a customer recommended price of $8099.00. Meanwhile the current AMD EPYC 7763 pricing is up around $8,600 USD, which was in competitive dance with the M128-30 in being a 64c/128t design.

This pricing is better positioned than where I would have expected and will make for interesting performance-per-dollar metrics in the next round of benchmarking.

The Ampere Altra Q80-30 as their former (non-Max) flagship is now priced at $3,950.

At the lower end of the spectrum the introductory Ampere Altra Q32-17 goes for $800 USD.