Today we have the launch of the Ampere Altra Arm CPUs. This is a completely new design built specifically for cloud providers. It has up to 80 cores and is designed to go head-to-head with AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” series processors as well as 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh parts. Ampere is launching today but we do not have a test system as we have had for all of the other major server chip launches recently. It sounds like Ampere is shipping mass production units soon, but not at the time we were briefed. Hopefully, we can get more hands-on insights in the near future.
[…]In this article, we are going to discuss the architecture based on the documents we have and our discussion with the company. We are going to check performance claims and help our readers critically analyze what they are being shown. We are then going to discuss systems disclosed with the chips before getting to our final thoughts.
This seems like an impressive piece of engineering, but we’ll definitely need test systems and proper reviews to test the claims about the chip. While I’m very happy AMD is back in the game and we’ve got some real competition to Intel, we as consumers would benefit even more from proper ISA competition, something we haven’t seen in a long time.
Always love an alternative, diversity is security.
But for me, no pricing means no opinion, price always matters as in real life applications as it’s never performance as a priority whatever the cost!
So many cores, so hard to measure real world performance, and so dependent on good software.
Very cool. This is obviously geared towards hosting, I’ve long wanted something like this to compete with x86 servers. The main drivers for something like this are pricing, performance, and efficiency. Please post an update once you come across 3rd party performance reviews!