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

When receiving this OSPREY review sample and opening the box, included was a USB-to-serial adapter. With having dealt with pre-production platforms in the past and seeing a serial adapter included, I feared the worst and was preparing for a headache. Fortunately, there was no headache for the initial setup or in the days since with testing this ARM server platform.

When connecting the power, Ethernet, VGA, and USB cable to the KVM switch, and powering it up, it "just worked" without any woes. The system quickly powered on and was a pleasant AMI AptioV UEFI BIOS screen -- no having to mess around with U-Boot or the like. The system proceeded to boot into the CentOS 7 AArch64 installation.

CentOS 7.5.1804 was running by default on this Ampere eMAG evaluation platform with the Linux 4.14 EL7 AArch64 kernel and GCC 6.0.0 compiler.

Within a few minutes, I was off to the races in being able to start some Linux benchmarks of this 32-core ARM server.