AmpereOne A192-32X Benchmarks: 192 Core ARM Server Performance & Power Efficiency

Last week an AmpereOne server finally arrived at Phoronix! Ampere Computing sent over a reviewer server of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship AArch64 server processor with 192 custom cores and using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD platform. I have been carrying out a number of benchmarks for this much-anticipated AArch64 cloud native processor and have initial performance and power efficiency metrics to share today to see how it compares to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server competition.

It's been a very long wait but AmpereOne is finally in the lab for benchmarking. We've been talking about AmpereOne going back to 2022 and following a very lengthy ramp period, it looks like AmpereOne is set to sail. Following AmpereOne instances finally going GA in the Oracle Cloud, Ampere Computing offered to send over a review server for Linux testing/benchmarking at Phoronix for the next few weeks. Over the next four weeks or so stay tuned for several AmpereOne performance articles with this being the first and a comparison to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC competition.

As mentioned this AmpereOne reviewer system is based on a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD that is an air-cooled 2U server solution for AmpereOne processors -- capable of handling up to the top-end 400 Watt processors. The Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD can handle up to four double-width GPUs, 16 DIMM slots in total for up to 2TB of DDR5-5200 memory with one DIMM per channel or up to 4TB of RAM at two DIMMs per channel but reduced then to DDR5-4400 speeds.

This Supermicro AmpereOne server offers two 25 GbE LAN ports, four PCIe 5.0 x16 FHFL slots, one PCIe 5.0 x16 LP slot, and one PCIe 5.0 x16 AIOM slot that is OCP 3.0 compatible. This AmpereOne server offers four 2.5-inch U.2 NVMe hot-swap bays that are compatible with PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 storage. Plus there is one M.2 NVMe slot on this server too. To much excitement, this Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server is shipping with OpenBMC for the BMC software stack as an alternative to the conventional proprietary BMC software traditionally found.

The AmpereOne server can boot standard AArch64 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Server 40. For the initial benchmarking I was using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This review server shipped with 8 x 64GB DDR5-5200 DIMMs, Samsung NVMe MZQL23T8HCLS-00A07 + MZ1L2960HCJR-00A07 storage, and using the top-end AmpereOne A192-32X processor.

The AmpereOne A192-32X boasts 192 AmpereOne cores, a 3.2GHz clock frequency, a rated 276 Watt usage power, and carries a $5,555 USD suggested price. There still doesn't appear to be any AmpereOne processors listed in-stock at the major Internet retailers yet and the likes of the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR server are still listed as "coming soon", so it's hard to get a complete picture yet on how the AmpereOne server pricing will look relative to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon servers or how close to the suggested pricing the AmpereOne processors will retail. Or how much longer the ramp process is expected to be until there is robust availability of these new AArch64 servers/processors.

When AmpereOne was first talked about it was before AMD shipped their EPYC Bergamo processors or Intel shipped Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors. With the lengthy period for getting my hands on AmpereOne hardware and the subsequent AMD/Intel launches compared to the timeframe AmpereOne was originally talked about, going into this testing my expectations weren't particularly high. Paired with Ampere Computing not posting too much in the way of actual AmpereOne benchmarks besides recent SPEC CPU numbers and some high level numbers focused on data center efficiency and all the while continuing to talk-up existing years-old Ampere Altra products, some of the excitement and expectations faded during this very lengthy AmpereOne ramp getting to today. But a few days in now of actual independent testing, the AmpereOne performance has been better than expected for competing against current Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors. The performance efficiency is also competing well overall.

There are still some firmware quirks being explored and some open-source workloads in 2024 remain not yet well optimized for AArch64, but simply put the performance thus far of the AmpereOne A192-32X has definitely exceeded my simmering expectations and AmpereOne has shown it can be competitive with the likes of AMD EPYC Bergamo and Intel Xeon Sierra Forest servers in performance and power efficiency.