[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