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

The last of these initial/teaser benchmarks was looking at the Ampere eMAG Osprey performance up against the Socionext 24-core Developerbox, another modern ARM option and this time is part of the 96Boards initiative. As a reminder, this $1200 USD offering has 24 ARM Cortex-A53 cores and supports DDR4-2133 UDIMMs.

To little surprise, the Ampere eMAG also stomped ahead of the Socionext Developerbox and its twenty-four A53 cores. Even if it had been 32 cores like the eMAG, the Cortex-A53 is significantly under-powered compared to the higher-end ARMv8 cores such as eMAG. The 32-core eMAG costs $850 USD while it will be interesting to see with a motherboard how the price compares to the Socionext.

Well, those are the benchmarks I have been able to wrap up in the past three days of having this Ampere eMAG Osprey server in the labs. Stay tuned for many more benchmarks and analysis in the weeks to come -- it's certainly an exciting month for Linux benchmarking. It will also be interesting to see what else comes of the Ampere developer website and their open-source/Linux efforts over the months ahead.

More information on eMAG is available at AmpereComputing.com. While the 32-core CPU costs $850 (or $550 for the 16-core model), I am waiting on hearing back about the expected motherboard/server pricing for retail systems and that should be known in the near future. Anyhow, this has the potential of being a game-changer in the ARM server space.