AMD Finally Set For Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM Launch

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Finally Set For Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM Launch

AMD appears poised to announce their long-awaited A1100 "Seattle" ARMv8 processor tomorrow...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-A1100-Tomorrow

[chuckula]

Comparisons to Jetson boards aren't very interesting. The Jetson boards exist to provide just-good-enough CPU performance while bringing a relatively powerful Nvidia GPU into an SoC for embedded use. These Seattle boards have no GPU on die and only include a rudimentary graphics chip to provide a basic frame buffer in a similar manner to many existing server board solutions.

The real competitor to these parts are the Broadwell Xeon-Ds that have been widely available for almost a year. In fact, a second wave of Xeon Ds has been popping up recently and by this spring there are going to be 16 core models out on the market to complement the existing 4 and 8 core models. However, even a low-end quad-core Xeon D will annihilate these boards in both performance and power efficiency. AMD's only hope is that they sell cheap.. and I mean *cheap* like less that $200 for a board.

[Michael]

Comparisons to Jetson boards aren't very interesting. The Jetson boards exist to provide just-good-enough CPU performance while bringing a relatively powerful Nvidia GPU into an SoC for embedded use. These Seattle boards have no GPU on die and only include a rudimentary graphics chip to provide a basic frame buffer in a similar manner to many existing server board solutions.

The real competitor to these parts are the Broadwell Xeon-Ds that have been widely available for almost a year. In fact, a second wave of Xeon Ds has been popping up recently and by this spring there are going to be 16 core models out on the market to complement the existing 4 and 8 core models. However, even a low-end quad-core Xeon D will annihilate these boards in both performance and power efficiency. AMD's only hope is that they sell cheap.. and I mean *cheap* like less that $200 for a board.

Of course if/when I get my hands on the HuskyBoard, the comparison will go well beyond just the Jetson.

[Nille]

AMD's only hope is that they sell cheap.. and I mean *cheap* like less that $200 for a board.

i doubt that. 2 x 10Gbit Ports means for me alone 500$. So with the Rest of the hardware. i doubt we see it for less that 1000$

[nils_]

i doubt that. 2 x 10Gbit Ports means for me alone 500$. So with the Rest of the hardware. i doubt we see it for less that 1000$

$900 should buy you a Xeon-D Board with 2x10GigE and 8 Broadwell Cores... The Quadcore can probably be had for around 600.

[schmidtbag]

$900 should buy you a Xeon-D Board with 2x10GigE and 8 Broadwell Cores... The Quadcore can probably be had for around 600.

Doesn't mean it's a better choice. I saw a couple of those Xeon-D boards and they will take up considerably more space and as far as I'm aware, will take up more power. There's a good chance they'll be more expensive too. Seeing as the A1100 is ARMv8, it's obviously targeted toward a different audience too. I'm sure it will probably be the most powerful ARM platform available.

[chuckula]

Doesn't mean it's a better choice. I saw a couple of those Xeon-D boards and they will take up considerably more space and as far as I'm aware, will take up more power. There's a good chance they'll be more expensive too. Seeing as the A1100 is ARMv8, it's obviously targeted toward a different audience too. I'm sure it will probably be the most powerful ARM platform available.

Uh.. the Xeon D boards that are available on the market are all industry-standard mini-ITX.
The development board pictured above, which is by no means the form-factor of an on-sale product, is technically smaller than mini-ITX but it is in a non-standard form factor that won't properly fit an industry standard case. This article details the weird form factor: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/201...es-enterprise/

Furthermore, to get that tiny form factor AMD sacrificed regular memory slots for a weird configuration of SO-DIMMs [with one SO-DIMM on the back side of the board where it's nearly impossible to reach without unscrewing the entire board] like on a notebook. Any professional in the enterprise is going to prefer a normal board with a normal DIMM form factor.

As for power consumption, the 8-core Xeon Ds that are in a completely different performance class might consume a few watts more under load, but total power consumption isn't that important to a professional. Instead it's performance/watt, and AMD's late and low-key launch clearly shows they know that these Seattle boards are more proof of concept than a serious entry into the microserver business.

[leiptrstormr]

I think you mean 4x SATA even though I only see 3 ports. Surely this will fit industry standard ATX cases. I give AMD more credit than that.
Edit: I take that back. The PCIE slot is on the wrong side. AMD were the ones who should have gotten this right. I guess that means I'll go with INTEL for my next NAS.

[Min1123]

The HuskyBoard isn't meant to be a server, or really a desktop either. There are other parts from other vendors for those. This is a dev board, and a huge step up from the RPi-like form-factors the consumer edition 96Boards are. I really hope that it is supported by the distros, because while 96Boards is trying very hard, their EFI support is thrown for a loop by the lack of a default compatible kernel on distro disks, and the requirement for those kernels to be spoon-fed a DTB file describing the device by a currently uncaring bootloader. This leaves their version of Debian as really the only option for people who'd like to use the board, not fix the kernel and boot loaders. Additionally, the price is sub-$500, which means it'll cost more than the current consumer-grade 96Boards. But this is AMD dipping its toes in the water. It isn't a custom AMD ARMv8-A compliant chip that just uses the ISA from ARM, it's using A57, which has been displaced by A72 already. Wait for K12 for a more serious AMD approach on servers, these are for preparation and early adopters, not for competition with Intel.

[hajj_3]

However, even a low-end quad-core Xeon D will annihilate these boards in both performance and power efficiency.

Indeed, but i reckon Cortex A72 cores will likely match the performance per watt of the xeon d cores. ARM v8.1 cpu cores will be announced this year, which are supposed to be better for parallelism, the successor to the A72 codenamed 'artemis' using 10nm. Artemis will likely be out 2H 2017.