ARM

[Sinac]

Za one koji još nisu naišli na vijest:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tec...uction-for-Mac

Ako će ARM ići u ovom smjeru - poboljšanje performansi uz umjerenu potrošnju el. energije - bit će to veliki udarac i Intelu i AMD-u. Pri tome ne mislim samo na consumer segment računala već i na serverske platforme. Svakome će biti interesantno da dobije 20% niži račun za struju uz iste performanse.

I baš me zanima što će biti sad nakon prodaje ARM d.o.o. () Nvidiji koja je bila "na čekanju". Nekako mi se čini da bismo mogli uskoro imati desktop kartice s normalnijom potrošnjom el. energije i grafičke čipove za mobilne platforme boljih performansi.

[The Exiled]

Još ih Britanci (malo) koče u totalnom preuzimanju, taman toliko da se i oni namire, ali naposljetku će nVidia vrlo vjerojatno asimilirati ARM u potpunosti, prema planu i programu.

Kaj se serverskog dijela priče tiče, ARM se već danas sasvim solidno nosi s modernim Intel i AMD rješenjima, tj. obje firme već sad imaju razlog za određenu dozu zabrinutosti.

Intel više, nego ostali, jer su ionako izgubljeni u prostoru i vremenu sa standardnim stvarima za koje nVidia i AMD konkuriraju, dok ARM dolazi kao još jedan u nizu.

[The Exiled]

Ampere roadmap update: Switching to in-house CPU designs, 128+ 5nm cores in 2022

For people not familiar with Ampere, the company was founded back in 2017 by former Intel president Renée James, notably built upon a group of former Intel engineers who had left along with her to the new adventure. Ampere’s next generation "Mystique" Altra Max is the next product on the roadmap, and is targeted to be sampling in the next few months and released later this year. The design relies on the same first generation Arm Neoverse N1 cores, at the same maximum 250W TDP as a drop-in replacement on the same platform, however with an optimised implementation that now allows for up to 128 CPU cores – 60% more cores than the first iteration of Altra we have today, and double the amount of cores of competitor systems from AMD or Amazon’s Graviton2. Today’s big reveal comes in regard to the microarchitecture choices that Ampere is going to be using starting in their next generation 2022 “Siryn” design, successor to the Altra Max, and relates to the CPU IP being used.

Starting with Siryn, Ampere will be switching over from Arm’s Neoverse cores to their new in-house full custom CPU microarchitecture. In fact, Ampere explains that what the move towards a full custom microarchitecture core design was actually always the plan for the company since its inception, and their custom CPU design had been in the works for the past 3+ years. The company wouldn’t comment on the exact status of the Siryn design right now – on whether it’s been taped in or taped out yet, but they do retierate that they’re planning customer sampling in early 2022 in accordance to prior roadmap disclosures.

The “Mystique” code-named Altra Max design will be characterised in that it’s able to increase the core-count by 60% versus the current generation Altra design, all while remaining at and below the same 250W TDP. the relative positioning against the Altra Q80-30 and the EPYC 7742 would indicate that the new chip would easily surpass the performance of even AMD’s latest EPYC 7763. Ampere actually discloses the SKU model name being used for the comparison, which is the "Altra Max M128-30" – meaning for the first time we have confirmation that all 128 cores are running at up to 3GHz clock speed, which is impressive given that we’re supposed to be seeing the same TDP and power characteristics between it and the Q80-33.

Izvor: AnandTech i ServeTheHome

[Sinac]

Malo nagađanja oko Apple M2 chipa:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-m2-chip

[The Exiled]

Rumours of an ARM IPO emerge as nVidia's acquisition hits regulatory hurdles

nVidia's ARM acquisition may face delays, as the GPU giant's facing more regulatory scrutiny than expected. nVidia expected their ARM acquisition to be closed by March 2022, though that end date now seems incredibly optimistic given reports of nVidia's delayed paperwork. The Telegraph has reported that ARM is considering an IPO (Initial Public Offering) as a backup plan should their deal with nVidia falls through. ARM has denied the report, as Simon Segars, Arm’s chief executive, stating that “There is no IPO planning going on at Arm, we are 100pc focused on closing this transaction.” Should nVidia fail to get the approval of all regulators, their ARM acquisition deal will fall through. While nVidia plans to acquire ARM before March 2022, the company has the option to extend its deal's deadline until September 2022. From there, nVidia can either renegotiate their deal and try again or put an end to their acquisition plans.

Should the European Commission receive nVidia's paperwork in September, regulators could still take six months or more to decide whether or not to approve the deal. This makes nVidia's original March 2022 deadline seen incredibly optimistic. nVidia does not have the power to rush the EU's regulators. As Jonathan Branton, head of competition at law firm DWF, puts it: “No regulator will allow itself to be pushed into a corner and having to make a decision in a timeframe it’s not happy with.” While nVidia's approval from the EU might delay proceedings, China may prove to be a larger hurdle to overcome. China is infamous for allowing approvals for large mergers to take from one year to 18 months, a factor that could push nVidia's ARM acquisition past their extended September 2022 deadline. Should ARM be acquired by nVidia, the company will fall under US ownership, a prospect that China is wary of. Beyond that, there are ongoing problems with ARM China, ARM's Chinese joint venture, which has seen the joint venture go rogue as ARM failed to oust the division's Chief Executive, Allen Wu.

Should nVidia acquire ARM, a US-based company, China will face the prospect of further sanctions from the US to limit its use of ARM technology. At this point, China remains a wild card, one that could make or break nVidia's ARM ambitions. As it stands, a lot of people are against nVidia's plan to acquire ARM. For starters, nVidia is an ARM licensee, a factor that would make nVidia a user of ARM's IP and the controller of ARM's direction as a company. Currently, ARM is the Switzerland of the technology industry, an independent entity that licenses its IP to a broad range of customers, including AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many more. nVidia ownership of ARM will allow nVidia to push ARM's development plans into areas that primarily benefit nVidia's hardware, potentially allow nVidia to withhold IP from licensees until after nVidia implements it (giving nVidia an unfair advantage), or increase their license costs to squeeze the margins of its competitors. While nVidia has the money and expertise to push ARM forward, nVidia's ownership of ARM remains a contentious issue. Beyond the issues raised in this article is the UK's loss of ARM to US ownership and the potential mass exodus of ARM licensees as nVidia's competitors seek to create a non-nVidia alternative to ARM's architecture.

Izvor: OC3D

[Sinac]

Nvidia se možda neće dokopati ARM Ltd.
Ne znam o kakvoj se nacionalnoj sigurnosti tu radi, više mi sliči na to da se netko u UK sjetio da ARM ima veliki potencijal.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/u...ws-2021-08-03/

[The Exiled]

Ma da, ono kaj smo pričali, još da se i Britanci namire u toj nVidia + ARM priči i to je to.

[The Exiled]

Will AMD get back into ARM server chips?

There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week when it looked like AMD was changing its position a little bit on whether or not it would get back into designing and selling server chips based on the Arm architecture. The funny thing is that the world has changed around AMD, and a lot of it for the good, as its EPYC X86 server processors have attained around ten percent market share (by shipments), but its position on Arm servers has not really changed. AMD’s top brass has said all along that if customers wanted Arm chips, it would make them. Well, maybe AMD’s position, internally, has changed just a little now that the server market has changed so much since the summer of 2015 when AMD stopped its “SkyBridge” X86-Arm shared socket effort, launched in 2014 with much fanfare. Prior to that announcement, AMD’s Opteron Arm server chips based on its homegrown “K12” core were expected in 2016 and were pushed out to 2017, and they were SoCs that combined Arm cores and GPUs, much as the “Seattle” Opteron A110 was. Seattle fizzled because it was too underpowered to do anything useful in the datacenter. So AMD started shutting things down, killing off SeaMicro microservers and its interconnect, killing off Arm server chips, so it could just hunker down on the EPYC server CPU. Because, frankly, the Arm server chip demand never materialized.

AMD has plenty of interesting options when it comes to Arm server chips. First of all, as Cavium, which is now part of Marvell, proved so well and as AMD proved with its Seattle Arm chips, it is not all that hard to do a global replace and put Arm cores in the same place where an Octeon NPU core or an X86 CPU core is in a processor design. The uncore stuff can be recycled, and if you are an Arm licensee as AMD is, you can take some of the stuff in the guts of the core — branch predictors, caches and cache hierarchies, vector units, other accelerators, memory controllers, and peripheral controllers and reuse these elements in an Arm server chip. So if a hyperscaler (not likely a public cloud since no one has a lot of Arm server workloads outside of the hyperscalers) doesn’t want to do an Arm server chip design all by its lonesome, they could hire AMD to do it.

While that would be interesting, what we think would actually be far more interesting is for AMD to pull a sequel to the SkyBridge effort and create a common socket for X86 and Arm server chips that is completely neutral about what kind of chip is plugged in. This is a real value for those who want flexibility, and if it really wanted to hedge its bets, it could do server CPU designs that had a lot of the components between X86 and Arm — and maybe someday RISC-V — be as common as possible.

Izvor: The Next Platform

[Dr. Strange]

Autor Sinac

Nvidia se možda neće dokopati ARM Ltd.
Ne znam o kakvoj se nacionalnoj sigurnosti tu radi, više mi sliči na to da se netko u UK sjetio da ARM ima veliki potencijal.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/u...ws-2021-08-03/

I bolje, ARM bi trebao biti neovisan, pružati licencu svima po jednakim uvjetima, a znamo kakva je Nvidia i koliko prljavo znaju igrati, nisu se bezveze svi živi pobunili i 99.9% da to neće uspjeti.

[Sinac]

Autor Dr. Strange

I bolje, ARM bi trebao biti neovisan, pružati licencu svima po jednakim uvjetima, a znamo kakva je Nvidia i koliko prljavo znaju igrati, nisu se bezveze svi živi pobunili i 99.9% da to neće uspjeti.

Da, stvari se i dodatno kompliciraju za Nvidiu.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...tough-scrutiny

Jedino mi nije jasno kako to da se nitko nije sjetio koliko ARM zapravo vrijedi i koju sve pozadinu ima cijela priča oko ARM-a dok Nvidia nije uletila s planom za kupnju.

[The Exiled]

Ampere Altra Max M128-30

The past month we have started our testing of Ampere's Altra Max M128-30, the company's new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested. With Ampere Altra Max the flagship processor is currently the M128-30 that has a 3.0GHz maximum clock speed for its 128 cores. Ampere Altra Max processors continue to use the Neoverse N1 cores, support eight channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory, 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4, and other features in common with Altra. Like the Q80-33, the M128-30 does maintain the same 250 watt TDP rating. Ampere Altra Max processors are a drop-in upgrade to Ampere Altra with an updated BMC and system firmware.

Across a wide range of tests, the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 2P is proving to be very competitive with the AMD EPYC 7763 2P in workloads that scale well and make full use of ARMv8 capabilities. Given the Ampere Altra Q80-33 2P was already outperforming the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P Ice Lake server, it's to no surprise Ampere's lead there has widened even more substantially with now being able to offer 128 cores per socket. It's incredible to see the competitiveness of Ampere Altra Max in testing ARM Linux servers since the days of Calxeda and how far not only the hardware but also the ARM software ecosystem as a whole has come over the past 10~15 years in being able to truly take on x86_64 in the server space.

Izvor: Phoronix

[Starsylph]

Čovječe, 128 jezgri, kada će to postati mainstream.

[The Exiled]