Ampere Altra Max M128-30 Linux Performance Preview

The Ampere Altra Max M128-30 was easily surpassing the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P Ice Lake server across these range of benchmarks.

For workloads well optimized for ARMv8 and able to scale out to 256 threads, the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P proves to be serious competition against the current offerings from Intel and AMD.

For Blender rendering performance, the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P nearly matched the AMD EPYC 7763 2P.

Not only was the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P nearly matching the AMD EPYC 7763 2P performance, but doing so with a much lower CPU power draw than the AMD Zen 3 server processors.

The CPU0 thermals were similar across the reference servers used with the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P, AMD EPYC 7763 2P, and Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P on CPU0 all having a 69~70 degree average operating temperature during the Blender render workloads. The thermals across various benchmarks from this Mount Jade server were similar between the Q80-33 and M128-30 as would be largely expected given the same reference TDP value.

Across a wide range of tests, the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P is proving to be very competitive with the AMD EPYC 7763 2P in workloads that scale well and make full use of ARMv8 capabilities. Given the Ampere Altra Q80-33 2P was already outperforming the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P Ice Lake server, it's to no surprise Ampere's lead there has widened even more substantially with now being able to offer 128 cores per socket. It's incredible to see the competitiveness of Ampere Altra Max in testing ARM Linux servers since the days of Calxeda and how far not only the hardware but also the ARM software ecosystem as a whole has come over the past 10~15 years in being able to truly take on x86_64 in the server space.

These are just some of the initial benchmarks carried out so far on the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 with more Linux (and hopefully FreeBSD) tests coming soon on Phoronix. Thanks to Ampere Computing for providing the review samples (along with AMD and Intel for the EPYC and Xeon review samples, respectively) for testing and stay tuned for those additional interesting benchmarks to come.