[The Exiled]

Ampere Altra performance shows it can compete with - or even outperform - AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon

While the talk in recent weeks has been about the performance of Apple's M1 ARM chip and then rumors there might be a 32 core chip in the pipe, there is already something much stronger: Ampere Altra has begun shipping and its flagship 80-core SoC with up to two sockets per server can easily take on the AMD EPYC 7742 "Rome" and Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" performance across a variety of workloads. Here is our initial look at the Ampere Altra performance on Linux in our independent performance benchmarks. Ampere Altra's (Quicksilver) cores are based on Arm's Neoverse N1 with modifications and fabricated on TSMC's N7 process. Also significant with Ampere Altra is eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory support and capable of addressing 4TB of memory per socket. On the connectivity front, Ampere Altra supports 128 PCI Express Gen4 lanes for 1P configurations and 192 PCIe 4.0 lanes for 2P configurations. Ampere Altra can also support up to four CCIX accelerators. The Ampere Altra SKU we have been testing is the Q80-33 that offers 80 cores with a 3.3GHz max clock frequency and is rated for a 250 Watt TDP.

So while Apple's M1 has done a good job for showing the ARM desktop performance potential, Ampere Altra's Q80 series shows what the performance can be like at the top-end for ARM within server and cloud deployments now actually providing serious competition against the current generation Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers. Looking ahead, Intel Ice Lake Xeon and AMD EPYC Milan are both expected next quarter. In fighting that Ampere already has their announced 128-core Ampere Altra Max (Mystique) processor that will retain socket compatibility with Ampere Altra and will be in production later in 2021. Given what we have seen with Ampere Altra, it will be very interesting to see how much of a performance leap they can achieve going forward with Mystique.

Izvor: Phoronix