Hands On & Initial Benchmarks With An Ampere eMAG 32-Core ARM Server

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Hands On & Initial Benchmarks With An Ampere eMAG 32-Core ARM Server

Especially with Qualcomm's Centriq efforts going quiet in recent months, one of the most interesting ARM server efforts at the moment is Ampere Computing -- the company founded by former Intel president Renee James and with several other ex-Intel employees on staff. They started off with the acquired assets from what was AppliedMicro and their X-Gene ARMv8 IP and for the past year have been improving it into their recently announced eMAG processors.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26954

[ms178]

But can it run Windows 10 on ARM?

Looking forward for your testing, especially against Xeon, Epyc,

Power 9 and

other ARM contenders if you get access to them in comparable configurations.

[boxie]

I too am looking forward to more benchmarks!

[Michael]

Yep will be running lots of benchmarks. At some point I should also be receiving one of the production-silicon Ampere servers being manufactured by Lenovo.

[hajj_3]

comparing it with Xeon D would be a much more useful comparison.

[Michael]

comparing it with Xeon D would be a much more useful comparison.

I don't currently have any Xeon D, but anyways, as said in the article more tests are coming with the hardware I do have.

[torsionbar28]

This is a compelling platform indeed, Ampere appears to have hit a home run in terms of performance. Their open developer initiatives, and preloaded CentOS are also promising - it tell me they understand the modern Linux ecosystem. This is a Good Thing!

From the photos, the server board size, layout, and screw placement all appear to be standard ATX? If so, it would be amazing if they could sell just the board and cpu to developers who don't necessarily need (or want) a rackmount server form factor in their home or office environment. If they can sell mobo and chip for ~$1k I'd buy one right now today.

[schmidtbag]

Wow this is surprisingly pretty good, and a decent price considering what you're getting. I'd be curious to see how this compares to a 32-thread x86 (like the Threadripper 1950X).

[ldesnogu]

Don't you have access to some ThunderX2 machine? This should be competitive against this Ampere chip.

[torsionbar28]

Wow this is surprisingly pretty good, and a decent price considering what you're getting. I'd be curious to see how this compares to a 32-thread x86 (like the Threadripper 1950X).

The 32 cores, 8 channels of DDR4, and 42 PCIe lanes puts it firmly in Threadripper/EPYC territory (on paper anyways) and solidly ahead of anything from intel. It's pretty amazing they managed all this in just 125w TDP.