
Cavium Is an Arm Server Contender - Katydid
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/27/cavium-truly-contender-one-two-arm-server-punch/
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tonysdg
I've run experiments/developed on both Applied Micro's X-Gene 1 and Cavium's
ThunderX (the original). Both of these have been touted as "ARM servers".

The X-Gene was complete crap in terms of both performance and power
consumption. The ThunderX was only really useful for highly-parallel
applications that don't require a lot of horsepower, and even then it's a
power hog.

I'm cautiously optimistic with Qualcomm's Centriq and Cavium's ThunderX2, but
unless they can make a compelling argument in terms of power consumption, I'm
skeptical of them making any inroads into the market. Sure, Intel Xeons and
IBM Power8s may suck power, but they're _damn_ fast, so you can execute your
workloads quickly and then just shut the machine down or enter idle power
states.

~~~
ece
Not to mention the amount of hardware standardization that still needs to
happen. Having a different image for each manufacturer's hardware is going to
get real old, real fast.

5+ years on, ARM on anywhere but mobile seems like a dud.

~~~
timthorn
You don't need a different image for different manufacturers' platforms. One
Linux image works across vendors. The standardisation effort started some
years ago resulting in SBSA/SBBR, which allows a common image to be used.

~~~
voltagex_
I really want to see someone attempt an Android Treble-like project for ARM
Linux distros.

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Cyberdog
Yesterday: ARM in your phones

Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch)

Tomorrow: ARM in your servers

Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop?

The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor:
[https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-
hey-s...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-siri/) \-
Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't
it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead?

I, for one, welcome our new ARM overlords.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> _The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-
> processor:[https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-
> hey-s...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s..). -
> Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but
> wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead?_

The current MBP already has ARM: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-
new-intel-driven-ma...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-
driven-macbooks-have-a-secondary-arm-processor-that-runs-touch-id-and-
security/)

But this is similar to ARM (or MIPS or whatever) cores that already exist in
all sort of peripherals (what's in your Wifi chipset? Bluetooth? SMC?), so
it's nothing new.

I'm dismissive of any talk of switching conventional Intel-based
desktop/laptops to ARM. It's not equivalent to Apple's switch from PPC to
Intel, because in that case there was a clear performance advantage. ARM may
have the performance-per-watt crown on the low-power end, but Intel maintains
the pure-performance lead everywhere else. Conventional desktops still care
about performance (and if you don't, likely you can switch to a Chromebook),
and there aren't any advantages to switching a heavily Intel-ISA-dependent
desktop ecosystem (macOS/Windows) to ARM.

~~~
Cyberdog
I care about performance in my phone too, so where can I buy an Intel phone?

The truth is that my phone doesn't have to be the fastest; it just has to be
_fast enough_ in balance with other factors important to me (size, battery
life, etc).

And the same goes with my laptop. I currently have an MBP with an i7
processor, and I'm a web developer - it's overkill. I also play games with it
now and then, but it's clear that the iGPU is the bottleneck there and not the
processor. Very rarely do I do heavy compiling or video encoding or other CPU-
maxing tasks on this thing.

So would I trade the i7 for an A-series plus a couple more hours of battery
life and/or a lower (or at least not further increased, damn it Apple) price?
Yes, I would take that trade, and probably never suffer for it.

~~~
hawski
Why you bought a laptop with an i7 then in the first place? There are already
more energy efficient alternatives - i5, i3, core m.

I have a theory that probably when Apple will release a laptop with their own
SoC it will be more expensive...

~~~
Cyberdog
Because it checked the other boxes I was looking for with regards to screen
size, memory, and so on.

Perhaps an A-series laptop would be more expensive for consumers (damn it,
Apple), but I don't think it would cost more for Apple to manufacture, since
they can do so much more of it in house.

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mtgx
This looks even more promising than Qualcomm's chip?

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-
takes-wing/)

Either way, competition is definitely heating-up in the server space. If I
were them I would price these chips super-aggressively (near-cost) for first
few generations to get rapid mass adoption and software support. Worry about
profits later, when they are established as serious players in the server chip
market.

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Symmetry
I'd sort of been expecting that ARM would begin making HPC inroads when SVE[1]
was ready to go. But I guess those two Neon units provide enough horsepower?

[1][https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/technology...](https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/technology-
update-the-scalable-vector-extension-sve-for-the-armv8-a-architecture)

~~~
ajtulloch
They don't for fp32 or int8 workloads until SVE IMO. High end Skylake as an
example has 2 AVX-512-F ports (and not considering AVX-512-4FMAPS), which give
you do 64 FLOP/cycle (512 / 32 * 2 * 2). Even 2 NEON units, assuming FMA's
execute in 1 cycle/unit, gives only 16 FLOP/cycle. For ML inference workloads
you can even get away with lower precision and even do away with floating
point (which helps motivate AVX-512-4VNNIW).

------
throw2016
ARM on desktop or server will be tightly controlled closed SOCs with zero
driver support. These will be nothing like the relatively open systems in the
PC world, so there is nothing to look forward to.

This is ARM's model and they have shown no interest in improving things beyond
kicking open source developers between the ARM and SOC vendors each blaming
the other for years on end.

Intel, even with something as nasty as ME, look like an angel in comparison.

~~~
andreiw
That’s not true at all.

That has been true only for the embedded and mobile space.

The server space is exactly being made open and compatible between SoCs (in
the same way AMD and Intel machines are). Platform crud (i2c, gpio, i2c, clock
trees and pinnmuxes) is hidden in firmware behind ACPI, PSCI and UEFI just
like on x86. SBSA and SBBR specs mandate stringent compatibility requirements.
Machine error handling is firmware-first. IO is basically PCIe now.

For an OS vendor or an IT guy these machines look almost exactly like an x86
box. And then they look the same between the Arm vendors too.

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antongribok
If anyone wants to play around with a 96-core Cavium ThunderX system for 10
cents an hour, [https://www.packet.net/](https://www.packet.net/) has some
deals on their spot pricing sometimes.

With their out-of-band console, you can watch it boot from the very beginning.

Not affiliated, just sometimes use them when I need to play around with a
physical box, and can't do so at work...

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fulafel
Interesting that the graph shows ICC getting 20% more performnance than GCC -
This seems a much bigger difference than normal, as people usually don't find
the ICC speedup enough to warrant using. Anyone know if it's a CPU2017
phenomenon, or has ICC recently dramatically improved, or was ICC always 20%
faster?

~~~
fractalb
or ICC was optimized for benchmarks

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deepnotderp
Larger ROB/OoO window than Xeon? Wow.

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ChuckMcM
I would enjoy seeing a Cavium based system that I was allowed to actually run
my own code on to see what was what. Over the years, in various roles, I've
listened to them trying to sell me servers but they have never actually had
hardware that they could just let me run code on.

