Avantek's Arm Workstation: Ampere eMAG 8180 32-core Arm64 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on May 22, 2020 8:00 AM ESTSPEC2006 & 2017: Weak ST Performance
Of course, while maybe the individual cores might not be all that performant, the chip employs 32 of them. Together with the 32MB L3 cache as well as the 8-channel DDR4-2666 memory interface certainly the system should be able to showcase better multi-core results.
Indeed, the chip does better in the tests, at least more often than not being able to beat the consumer-grade Intel CPU. The performance scaling of the eMAG system also isn’t bad at all – scaling from 1 core to 32 cores sees the performance scale with an average factor of 0.73x per core, and a median per SPEC2006 and 2017 test of 0.78x; that’s much better scaling than Amazon’s Graviton2 when scaling ST performance to its full 64 cores.
Still, the MT results, while beating the Intel system, still don’t look all that great when considering the fact that we’re talking about 8 cores vs 32 cores. A 400% advantage in cores for only a 30% performance advantage.
The Graviton2 naturally eclipses both comparisons here, and the only reason to consider this chip’s figures is that Ampere’s upcoming Altra processor with 80 cores and 3GHz should be notably faster than the Amazon chip.
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mode_13h - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
Heh, yeah. Hopefully, just a typo.mode_13h - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
Cool review. Thanks.If you'd asked me 5-7 years ago, I thought I'd already be running an ARM-based server or workstation, by now. Maybe I was off by a few years?
Anyway, I think we'll look back on this as a milestone. It's not the very first ARM-based workstation I've seen (for that, check out https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&... ), but certainly the most compelling.
KAlmquist - Monday, May 25, 2020 - link
Linking is, in principle, pretty parallelizable. Static libraries are a problem for parallel linking because you have to know which symbols are referenced but not defined by files preceding the library before you can determine which object files in the library are needed, but these days people use shared libraries instead of static libraries. Generating the memory layout is a single threaded operation, but a quick one.There are a lot of companies that would benefit from the existence of a parallelized linker. Avantek would have a more compelling product. Any company that does lots of software development would benefit from shorter build times. So I expect that eventually someone will fund the development of such a linker.
schm121 - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
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futurepastnow - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
The next Mac Pro?