Ampere Altra Max Continues To Deliver Competitive Power Efficiency To AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon

While it's been three years now since Ampere Altra Q80 was first introduced and two years since first testing the 128-core Ampere Altra Max, this ARM server platform has aged rather well with more robust hardware platforms coming to market with better firmware, the AArch64 Linux/open-source software ecosystem as a whole improving a lot during this time and more open-source projects receiving ARM optimizations, and other improvements made. While we're eagerly awaiting to see AmpereOne hardware, here is a look at how Ampere Altra Max M128-30 is standing up against current AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo server CPUs along with Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors in raw performance and power efficiency.

The Ampere Altra / Altra Max platform has matured a lot over the past three years. Recently I covered the Ubuntu Linux performance continuing to improve and routinely note the continued flow of new ARM software optimizations reaching different open-source projects. As noted in that prior article, Giga Computing recently sent over their Gigabyte G242-P36 barebones server. The G242-P36 can handle both Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max servers, up to two DPUs and up to two NVIDIA GPUs, up to 16 DDR4 DIMMs, 4 x 2.5-inch Gen4 NVMe hot-swappable bays, redundant 1600W power supplies, and all around a great Ampere Altra (Max) platform especially if wanting one to accommodate multiple GPUs for AI or similar platforms.

This G242-P36 server with the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 processor has been working out very well in my tests the past number of weeks. This is been working out much better than the Ampere Computing Mt Jade reference server as the only other Altra platform in the labs. No firmware headaches or other quirks to deal with for this Giga Computing ARM server and the ARM Linux server distributions tried have all worked out great.

Atop Ubuntu 23.10 with a Linux 6.6 kernel build I carried out fresh benchmarks of the Ampere Altra Max 128-core against the EPYC 9554, EPYC 9654, EPYC 9684X, and EPYC 9754. On the Intel side was their current Xeon Platinum 8490H Sapphire Rapids processor. Only 1P tests were done for this article due to the Giga Computing server being a single socket platform. Each configuration was running with RAM at its maximum number of memory channels and frequency. A 3.2TB Micron 7450 Max NVMe SSD was used for testing each of the processors/platforms.