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For context this is an evolution of the Applied Micro X-gene (I believe this is the 3rd generation). The 1st gen was the famous Mustang, one of the first Aarch64 chips generally available that ran Linux. I still have one in my loft somewhere.

Edit: I should note that if you used the X-gene 1 it was very slow, albeit a reliable workhorse for early 64-bit ARM Linux development. These newer chips have far better performance.



The meandering paths that these different processor families take is interesting on its own. eMag and the Thunder X2 are expensive to develop but so promising that the product seems to find a new gear even when one company runs our of steam developing it. That or they find a new C-Suite group that has the same opinion as me.


Thank You, there were too many ARM Server Startup, merger and acquisition I sort of lost count. I think we are left with Ampere and one from Marvell.

I sort of record Applied Micro were doing POWER as well, is that still the case with Ampere?


Yes, seems like Ampere is the big public server player now.

Marvell bought Cavium which has the ThunderX line. (ThunderX2 being a rather HPC-oriented chip, I think there's a supercomputer already built with it.) Marvell also makes networking-gear-oriented smaller chips (e.g. Armada 8k), one of which is in my little ARM Desktop (MACCHIATObin) :)

NXP (Layerscape) and Mellanox (BlueField) also make network-oriented chips that have around 24 Cortex-A72 cores. NXP's is in SolidRun's newer workstation product.

Meanwhile Amazon bought Annapurna Labs and they make the Graviton (2) for the AWS cloud. This isn't something you can touch physically but it's going to have the biggest impact of all things. This is the real confirmation that Arm servers are legit and the x86/amd64 monopoly is over.

There's also Huawei HiSilicon's Taishan/Kunpeng stuff, which you apparently can buy if you're a serious business, but now it's available in the public Huawei Cloud, but only for the Chinese region it seems??

Oh and Fujitsu is making some epic chip with HBM2 memory and the new Scalable Vector Extensions. But that's only available if you're making supercomputers.

And Nuvia is going to be a thing eventually.. they have not announced anything yet, we have no idea which ISA they are even going to use (could be RISC-V or POWER or SPARC for all we know) but a prominent UEFI/ACPI-on-Arm person is now their VP of Software and is still referring to the Arm ecosystem as "we" https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1234734345350369281 :)

And yeah.. press F to pay respects for Qualcomm Centriq and AMD Seattle.


>And Nuvia is going to be a thing eventually..

According to techcrunch they have confirmed it will be built on top ARM.

Edit: That is assuming they sort out their lawsuit with Apple.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles...


I see Ampere eMag is supported by OpenBSD (https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html) :-)

It had "only" 32 cores. I still find it a lot.

I guess it would be easy to port OpenBSD to the Altra since it boots from UEFI.


Yes. There is no "porting" with new SBSA/SBBR systems — only fixing bugs and/or adding quirks :)

On FreeBSD for the eMAG, we've had to:

- ignore a wrong value for UART access width https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34622... (IIRC Ampere did fix the value in the newer FW revisions)

- restore another register after calling EFI runtime services https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34699...

- fix some PCIe things we were doing wrong https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34792... https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34793...

- fix some memory map things https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34958...


Ampere eMAG was X-Gene 3 but Altra appears to have little or no X-Gene IP in it.




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