
Fujitsu’s Fugaku and A64FX Take Arm to the Top with 415 PetaFLOPs - dmmalam
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869/new-1-supercomputer-fujitsus-fugaku-and-a64fx-take-arm-to-the-top-with-415-petaflops
======
jabl
See also closely related
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601098)
from yesterday.

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DCKing
This year seems to be the year of big serious ARM performance.

\- AWS Graviton 2 is actually a viable option in the public cloud.

\- Apple starts transitioning their workhorses to ARM.

\- First place in the TOP500, apparently not due to custom magic or GPUs, but
due to _already existing /standardized_ ARM vector extensions.

ARM is becoming such a household name that Fujitsu appears to have traded
getting a paid ARM license over the royalty free SPARC instruction set they
used to work with. I hope POWER can survive this onslaught, as SPARC surely
has no hope of survival after this.

~~~
lazyjones
Let's hope M$ will fix their OS to support ARM properly[1] soon, and that we
get nice passive-cooled desktop systems.

[1] no x64 support, limited OpenGL/3D support, no Fax/Scan support... AFAIK.

~~~
MikusR
Windows on arm supports both 32 and 64 bit arm software. x86-64 emulation is
missing because Intel threatened to sue
([https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-
going-strong/))

~~~
easygenes
Yep, who wants to guess Intel made some key hires of transpilation experts to
develop a nice patent arsenal just for this purpose?

~~~
my123
The last of the patents preventing x86_64 binary translation expires Q3 this
year, expect fun things to happen. (and no, MS isn't sleeping)

~~~
aparashk
Which patent is that? Genuinely curious.

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mkl
Did Apple convince these guys and TSMC (re 5nm production) to make their big
ARM announcements the same day ARM Macs are announced?

If it's not great marketing then it's a heck of a coincidence.

~~~
jychang
Well, the WWDC rumors have been talking about ARM macs for weeks. If you were
TSMC or Fujitsu and wanted to take advantage of a day where ARM was trending,
you could schedule the announcement around WWDC without cooperating with
Apple.

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pjmlp
And on that note, A64FX software stack also makes use of McKernel an an OS
alternative.

[https://github.com/RIKEN-SysSoft/mckernel](https://github.com/RIKEN-
SysSoft/mckernel)

[https://www.sys.r-ccs.riken.jp/ResearchTopics/os/mckernel/](https://www.sys.r-ccs.riken.jp/ResearchTopics/os/mckernel/)

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close04
The thing that surprised me most is that when compared to Summit, the previous
#1 powered by POWER9 cores and Nvidia GV100 accelerators, Fugaku seems to show
the exact same power efficiency.

> The new Fugaku supercomputer is bigger than Summit in practically every way.
> It has 3.05x cores, it has 2.8x the score in the official LINPACK tests, and
> consumes 2.8x the power

So were the Nvidia accelerators what drove up Summit's efficiency?

~~~
jabl
> So were the Nvidia accelerators what drove up Summit's efficiency?

Yes. And the next generation NVIDIA accelerators (A100) in the Selene computer
(#7 on the list) are even more efficient, currently taking the #2 spot on the
green500 list (which is essentially the top500 list ordered by
performance/watt).

Edit: Disclaimer: I work for NVIDIA.

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newswasboring
I remember back in university when I first read about the ARM business model,
I naively thought it will always be the second fiddle to intel x86. At that
time x86 had such a strong hold that for my young brain it was unimaginable
that anyone else will capture the CPU market apart from embedded systems.

The year 2020 is the conclusion of a long push by ARM and now I am wondering
can RISC-V will be taking a similar path.

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Merrill
It appears that the Fujitsu A64FX is planned for Cray as well as its own A64FX
machines, the PRIMEHPC FX1000 and PRIMEHPC FX700 models.

[https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/11/12/cray-fujitsu-both-
bringin...](https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/11/12/cray-fujitsu-both-bringing-
fujitsu-a64fx-based-supercomputers-to-market-in-2020/)

>The new HPE-Cray system, part of the Cray CS500 lineup, will employ the
Fujitsu A64FX Arm-based processor with Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE)
and second-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Named as customers in
today’s release are Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Stony Brook University,
and University of Bristol. Cray and Fujitsu said they will be exploring
engineering collaboration, co-development, and joint go-to-market strategies
to meet customer demand as supercomputing extends into the exascale era.

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teruakohatu
Are we getting to the point where we GPUs might be replaced by larabee style
general purpose CPUs?

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pezezin
I seriously doubt it. GPUs are much more than the compute units; there is also
the geometry setup, rasterizers, texture units, ROPs, etc. Doing all those
tasks in software would be terribly expensive.

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zapnuk
How does it fare in terms of energy efficiency? Or is this not a concern at
all?

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shenberg
Seems like energy efficiency is the same as the previous Top-1 (performance
scaled linearly with the increase in power consumption), which is frankly not
a great ad for the system.

~~~
jgtrosh
Setting as it has no accelerator, i'd say it shows how efficient the arm chips
are, no?

