
16nm ARMv8 SoC for servers and workstations - flatroze
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11189/appliedmicro-x-gene-3-soc-starts-sampling
======
CaliforniaKarl
I'm of mixed feelings about this.

I'm in HPC now, and the thing I'm interested in is RIKEN's post-K
supercomputer
([http://www.aics.riken.jp/fs2020p/en/](http://www.aics.riken.jp/fs2020p/en/)).
Fujitsu is building it, and they're going to be producing the CPUs that will
be going into post-K, just as they did for K. But, where the K supercomputer
used SPARC, this new one is going to use ARM
([https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for-
post...](https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for-post-k-
supercomputer-will-ride-arm-into-exascale/)). Also, Fujitsu are working with
ARM to develop HPC-specific architecture extensions to the ARMv8 spec.

Plus, as Applied Micro has been acquired by MACOM, I wonder how that's going
to settle out.

So, I'm waiting to see what Fujitsu comes up with. The Post-K supercomputer
will be a very good proving ground.

~~~
tom_mellior
Thanks for the interesting links! But why the mixed feelings? Do you think
vendors should hold off on selling a product that makes them money _now_ to
see what comes out of a single, highly specific project in five years?

------
ksec
The only advantage I see here is memory capacity. Well in the x86 landscape we
have AMD giving you access of 1TB for less dollar then Intel. And if you
include the COST of 1TB memory, the CPU dollar saving from a CPU is
negligible. Not to mention the additional work that needs to port software to
ARM.

I still dont see ARM going anywhere in server or workstation ( In the near
future ).

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m-j-fox
8 DDR channels. Seems like everyone putting 30+ cores on a chip needs to learn
this lesson. Memory bandwidth is the bottleneck. Intel uses HBM stacked on the
Xeon Phi. Anyone who has the capability should do likewise or maybe try 8 DDR
channels, pin count be damned.

~~~
awordnot
This is what AMD's new Epyc server CPUs are rumored to have.

~~~
sliken
Quite more than a rumor at this point. The Eypc has 4 Ryzen dies, each of
which on an on chip 2 channel memory controller.

[http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-raises-
exp...](http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-raises-
expectations-2017may16.aspx)

------
kev009
This looks pretty decent in terms of hitting close to the Xeon 2680v4. But
every server ARM play so far has been unobtanium until it's grossly out of
date.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I might be excessively cynical, but I suspect that most of these ARM server
plays are narrowly targeted at the biggest cloud/advertising companies
(Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.), with the publicity being meant more for
investors than potential customers. I remember seeing some server architecture
(Cavium ThunderX, maybe?) specifically being advertised as good for social
media analytics. Are there more than 10 companies in the world that actually
buy their own hardware specifically for that?

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wand3r
There was a pretty bad article about chip making posted a few weeks ago. The
one great point it made was that the nm was not comparable across
manufacturers. So, I guess my question is how big of a deal is this?

------
wmf
This is from March and nothing has been heard since then. Somehow they totally
squandered their lead.

------
bhouston
The performance for arm server chips is coming along.

~~~
sargun
I did a bunch of testing with ARM (ThunderX) for an IPC workload using this
codebase: github.com/sargun/wat. Unfortunately, it no longer runs on ARM,
because I'm using inline assembly.

The ThunderX's power comes from the fact it's a 48-core CPU, which is awesome
for web workloads. The problem comes in that inter-core transfer is
ridiculously slow. To make a 64-byte RPC (return / response), was in the area
of ~1100 nanoseconds, whereas x86-64 was on the order of 500 nanoseconds on a
2 generation old CPU. Testing on a more modern CPU cut the time further.

I'd love to see ARM either catch-up in single-core performance, or multi-core
performance, but until then I don't feel like it's viable.

~~~
bhouston
According to the article this CPU as compared to the ThunderX has 80% faster
integer performance for the whole CPU and 2x faster integer performance per
core - so major a improvement:

[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11189/APM-X-
Gene-3-performa...](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11189/APM-X-
Gene-3-performance_575px.png)

~~~
sargun
Turns out that number crunching isn't what my CPU is doing most of the time.
:-/.

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CaliforniaKarl
When I went to the site, I got a fairly insidious takeover ad: The ad took
over the whole page, displaying a 10-second countdown timer and a "Click Here
to go to site" link. The "Click Here…" link triggered another pop-up ad (it
never took me to the site), and when the timer expired, nothing happened. The
URL bar had been changed, so reloading wouldn't help, and the back button took
me to a blank screen.

Therefore, I present an outline.com link for the article:
[https://www.outline.com/cUUPVn](https://www.outline.com/cUUPVn)

~~~
mtm8643
Anandtech has been a mainstay for professional hardware reviews and opinions
for more than a decade... I actually just made a HN account to tell you that
you might want to check your browser for malware because I've never seen
anything like that on there.

~~~
AlphaSite
They were bought out a few years ago.

