
Marvell Cranks Up Cores and Clocks with “Triton” ThunderX3 - rbanffy
https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/03/16/marvell-cranks-up-cores-and-clocks-with-triton-thunderx3/
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hydroreadsstuff
This announcement is lacking a lot of specifics, which means it's worse than
N1 / Ampere and more of the competition.

TNP always annoys me by its wordiness and lack of tables and numbers. It's
incredibly low signal to noise compared to Ars and Anandtech.

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mappu
Here's the Anandtech version: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15621/marvell-
announces-thund...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15621/marvell-announces-
thunderx3-96-cores-384-thread-3rd-gen-arm-server-processor)

 _> If we use the TX2 figures we have at hand, this would mean the new chip
would land slightly ahead of Neoverse-N1 systems such as the Graviton2, and
match more aggressively clocked designs such as the Ampere Altra._

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slizard
Without HBM or more memory channels, the top SKUs will be rather hard to feed
considering the (claimed) at least ~3-5x increase in instructions/s/socket
while only increasing memory bandwidth by ~20%.

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rbanffy
Maybe they mitigated that by increasing cache sizes, but there is no
information available about that yet. I would expect that, since they support
4 threads per core and that may drive up cache usage (even though one thread
may be able to be useful while another is waiting for a cache miss to clear).

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vorpalhex
Has there been any mention of MSRPs on these new arm chips? As a home server
enthusiast, I'd love to have a serious arm driven system to play with...

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bluedino
The ThunderX2 model isn't in stock, but the Ampere model is.

Base config with Ampere eMAG 8180 32 core 2.8GHz 3MB L3 is about $3,000

[https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-
workstatio...](https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-
workstation.html)

~~~
floatboth
(That's not the new generations, which are not released yet, and there's no
price info yet)

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0xcde4c3db
Has the ThunderX family shipped in "mere mortal" hardware, or is it all
supercomputers and custom FANG servers and the like? I seem to remember that
when ThunderX first launched, there was some noise about "ARM servers" being a
market that exists, and the company I worked for at the time was looking into
using it for a new product but gave up on it for some reason.

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SloopJon
I think I've used one of these Gigabyte rack servers:

[https://www.gigabyte.com/us/ARM-Server](https://www.gigabyte.com/us/ARM-
Server)

I'm not sure offhand what the pricing is, but my guess would be less than
$10,000, depending on the configuration.

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sudosysgen
So much more than an equivalent x86 box.

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rbanffy
There aren't many 384-thread x86 boxes around, certainly none below US$ 10K

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sudosysgen
384 threads at which SMT level again?

What's the clock speed, and what's the IPC compared to say a 64 core 128
thread Threadripper? You'll find it won't compare favourably for 99.9% of
workloads.

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navaati
240W, 96 quite beefy ARM cores, I'm not sure about SMT. All that in 1U. The
density is becoming mad.

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wyldfire
> The Triton chip will have eight memory controllers supporting memory running
> at 3.2 GHz, which is the same number of controllers in the Vulcan chip,
> which maxxed out at 2.67 GHz memory speeds. That’s a 20 percent increase in
> memory bandwidth, and the question is how that will balance out against the
> high core counts in some of the Triton SKUs.

96 cores, seems like it would be tricky to keep them busy with modest memory
throughput increases.

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kingosticks
Do they really mean memory running at 3.2GHz? What memory would be running
that fast? Isn't this HBM2E and it's 3.2Gbps bandwidth?

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mastax
DDR4 easily runs at 3200 MHz (DDR) though I don't know if that's common yet
for ECC RDIMMS.

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kingosticks
Doh! yes, thanks, that makes a LOT more sense!

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bryanmgreen
Reminds me of this article from 2011 blowing my mind... 12,500 cores for
Pixar's Cars 2

[https://www.cnet.com/news/new-technology-revs-up-pixars-
cars...](https://www.cnet.com/news/new-technology-revs-up-pixars-cars-2/)

