
Avantek's Arm Workstation: Ampere EMAG 8180 32-Core Arm64 Review - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15733/ampere-emag-system-a-32core-arm64-workstation
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qubex
I’d really like to have a capable Arm 64 workstation. Unfortunately there
aren’t many options — and this one really doesn’t tickle my fancy.

I’ve been looking into Nvidia’s Xavier NX of late but, of course, it’s not an
SBSA-compliant system, leaving the user totally at the mercy of the producer
(Nvidia, in this case, as is indeed tangentially mentioned by the article
itself).

Whenever I mention this people usually throw in irrelevant statements such as
picking up a Raspberry Pi 4 (of which I have a couple) or another SBC, but
really I’m looking for something which offers PCIe and all the creature
comforts (even the HoneyComb LX2K lacks PCIe beyond a single M.2 slot for the
SSD and offers no wireless capabilities unless you add a USB3 dongle).

Is there a reason why somebody hasn’t (oh, I don’t know) thrown a Snapdragon
8cx on a board with some of these accoutrements and provided it in a mini-ATX
form-factor?

~~~
rubatuga
Check out developerbox.

[https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/](https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/)

~~~
StillBored
Which is an even worse option vs the emag. The 1Ghz A53's in that thing make
single threaded perf of the emag look look like a speed demon.

The honeycomb (or even the mcbin) are better choices if you just want a PCIe
slot.

~~~
rubatuga
At least it's not vulnerable to spectre

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drewg123
I evaluated an EMAG at work several months ago. It didn't end up making sense
for us compared to x86, but it provided a good opportunity to port our server
stack to arm64 and it was a great learning experience.

Regarding the boot times: If you watch the serial console when the machine is
booting, you see that its running a native arm boot loader (uboot?), and then
that boot loader boots the EFI firmware. So I think the "double bootloader" is
a large part of the long boot times.

~~~
a012
But even loading up Ubuntu looks painful, it took 2 more minutes to complete.

~~~
drewg123
Its hard to tell whats going on with the OS boot from their video of the glass
console because of the endemic information hiding prevalent in OSes these
days. God forbid that you have some kind of progress indicator, or even text
(the horror! we might confuse users!)

In my case, I was booting FreeBSD, and I don't remember having boot much
slower on this box than it does on Intel Xeon or AMD Rome once the EFI bios
finally handed off to the FreeBSD efi boot loader.

~~~
qubex
I commiserate with you. For the past fifteen years or so I’ve set my macs to
verbose boot because I want to see what’s going on and where they seize up (if
indeed that happens). Doesn’t happen often but in the few occasions it has
it’s really saved my bacon.

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DCKing
Given the weak single core performance despite running at 3 GHz, and the ARM
v8.0 compliance (ARM v8.5 is published, Apple is on ARM v8.4), is this not
some thin repackaging of the ARM Cortex A72/73 IP as a server processor?
Cortex A73 phones (at peak 2.5 GHz) also do 30ish % of a high end Intel chip
in single threaded benchmarks... I don't have a good smoking gun to know for
sure they went this route, but this thing doesn't seem to exceed Android
smartphone performance at least.

You're not going to be making a very appealing workstation by just throwing
old mobile focused ARM licensed IP together (or by something that looks and
performs a lot like it). Shame the only party thinking in the direction of
workstation like performance for ARM is Apple. Then again, making good
workstation chips requires a lot of money. Guess they have to have a market
first.

~~~
floatboth
This is the last evolution of the quite old APM X-Gene microarchitecture and
you can see it's way worse per clock than Cortex-A72. Ampere just had to have
something out of the door in 2019 I guess.

The _new_ Ampere "Altra" chip is going to be like an Amazon Graviton2, but
higher clocked, so that's going to be really fast.

~~~
StillBored
Which is great, but will there be 16-32 core version that average mortals can
afford, or is it going to be another thunderX2 workstation?

The latter ([https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-
thunderxstatio...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-
thunderxstation-cavium-thunderx2-socs)) is a pretty serious piece of developer
hardware, with much better single thread perf, and 64 cores. But its also
quite spendy, and you have to be a really serious arm developer to be able to
justify one.

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kristopolous
This article is kinda empty. Have people used this to target mobile devices,
embedded? Is the development easier? What about vm and emulator performance?
A64FX compatibility?

~~~
floatboth
> A64FX compatibility?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that..

You can't test SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) using programs on an eMAG or
any other processor currently available other than the A64FX. Regular
software, yes, it's all AArch64.

~~~
kristopolous
I feel like the machine has some potentially pretty useful applications
specific to targeting other devices since arm is everywhere. I've been
impatient doing ARM things both on x86 and my pi4.

If the company put 20 or so online people could log into with 1 hour sessions
or something, that'd be pretty useful to see if it's a good fit

~~~
sitkack
That is possible here for $1/hr
[https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-
arm/](https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-arm/)

I was able to login, install rust via rustup, install htop, build ripgrep
showing nearly all of the cores being used, use ripgrep and kill the instance
in about the same time on large x86 box.

~~~
floatboth
On AWS, you can do that with smaller instances (down to a single core) and now
with m6g, with great single-core performance :)

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guenthert
Uh, fans everywhere. Then I might as well get a desk-side computer with an
AMD/Intel 64 bit multicore CPU.

Well, I was just curious and not in the market for a new workstation. I would
appreciate a hint for a fan-less MB (Arm or otherwise) with (3.3V) PCI sockets
...

