The Altra overall is an astounding achievement – the company has managed to meet, and maybe even surpass all expectations out of this first-generation design. With one fell swoop Ampere managed to position itself as a top competitor in the server CPU market. The Arm server dream is no longer a dream, it’s here today, and it’s real.
AnandTech reviews the 80-core ARM server processor from Ampere – two of them in one server, in fact – and comes away incredibly impressed.
First thought: Oooh that’s a fat monster of a CPU. Looking at the pictures of the server internals I’m reminded of the days when I stared into the inside of a Commodore PET. It wasn’t many years later before transputer supercomputers were a thing. I wonder how they compare to this. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a decade or two’s time the whole thing was the size of a sugar cube.
Once again, I am excited to see alternative systems.
Once again, I am disappointed to see I cannot actually buy one.
They don’t seem to be available on usual places (newegg, amazon, ebay). In fact even if you look for older gen ARM servers, there was exactly 1 usable result I found on eBay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-R150-T62-1U-4-bay-Cavium-ThunderX-ARM-2x-48-core-1U-Rackmount-Server/284075687168?hash=item42243afd00:g:TKUAAOSw21pfqt7V
I think I will just tinker with the low powered Jetson for a while:
https://www.newegg.com/nvidia-945-13541-0000-000/p/N82E16813190013
You can always rent an ARM instance in EC2…
javiercero1,
I agree with sukru and would also like to see these types of products available for direct purchase. If you’re an ecommerce businesses competing with amazon.com, renting time in a remote facility owned by amazon isn’t a great idea. More generally I’d like to see less dependency on huge corporations across the board, this collective behavior of mass consolidation is putting us down the path of huge monopolies oligopolies
You can get an ARM rack system, but I don’t think they are cheap.
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/ARM-Server
javiercero1,
Yeah, they have the SKUs, but I’ve tried clicking on a couple of gigabyte’s resellers and so far I haven’t found a gigabyte reseller selling this SKU (like you I’m curious what they would sell for).
I searched ebay and a single listing came up in the UK…
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-R281-3C1-12-SAS-2U-Rack-Server-Part-no-6NR2813C1MR-00-311/293854079708
The barebones server itself with no disks/ram/cpus was $1500. That is quite expensive for such an incomplete system that’s a few years old. You definitely have more buying power with commodity x86 parts, especially if you don’t need the latest and greatest. Of course if you want an ARM server, you’ve gotta pay the ARM prices, but I really hope ARM computers can become a commodity in the server space. It’s difficult and expensive to switch when these are so niche.
Honestly, for the types of applications/scale most of us will need, x86 systems are plenty.
These types of designs are geared for large scale infrastructure, and unfortunately there’s little provision for support the types of customers that we represent.
javiercero1,
Yes. The discussion kind of went full circle though…
Some day our dependency on oil^b^b^bintel has to be broken, right? Haha.
Well, there’s always AMD.
There are plenty of ARM boards for people to play around. There’s a nice ecosystem around stuff like the Raspberry Pi. And apple is now going full on ARM as well. And then there are lots of ARM chrome books. And tablets, and smart phones, etc. etc.
So it’s not like there’s a shortage of non-intel systems on the consumer space, which is where most people in this thread operate.
But if ARM based servers is a necessity, then that’s probably a business expense.
javiercero1,
Indeed there is.
Yeah, but at some point your needs grow beyond tinkering and into production ready systems, With x86 those needs can be met by thousands and thousands of vendors. Even on a low budget you can go to ebay and buy high end hardware used. With ARM there’s not nearly as much competition. Sure, we’ve got phones and other portable form factors, but they aren’t suitable for the turnkey enterprise applications we’re talking about. Also the vast majority of these devices are not linux friendly at all, which is ironic given the fact they run a fork of linux.
I’m not sure, I suspect a lot of us work in technology and aren’t just simple consumers.
Perhaps the problem may be that ARM is not there yet for some of your needs, if there’s already tremendous offer. I don’t think many, if any, in this site work with the types of scale out applications that most ARM servers seem to be targetted at this moment.
There’s some offer, but as you pointed out nowhere near what you get in the x86 ecosystem. Honestly, I think that’s not going to change anytime soon, just like how I don’t expect phones to run x86 either
There’s some Cavium offerings, but couldn’t find anything in the US
https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html
How about this:
https://www.solid-run.com/embedded-networking/nxp-lx2160a-family/cex7-lx2160/
Well, only one fifth of the cores. But at least you can buy it and have it “physically”.
The benchmarks (only set I could find) seems respectable:
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1909169-JONA-190709812
(For the LX2160A CPU).
However, at that price levels you can get a full fledged Epyc server board in the same form factor:
https://mitxpc.com/products/m11sdv-8c-ln4f, and can use it as a workstation (i.e.: has video out).
Still it might be worth tinkering with. Thanks for the link.
Its not SBSA certified. It has its own github page full of hacks needed to get it to boot. Ampere will work with whatever linux os you want ( with in reason)
Bill Shooter of Bul,
+1
The ideal ARM computer is one capable of running mainline linux out of the box and doesn’t need a special kernel or patches or hacks in order to work!