ARM-based computing

Donnie Fisher · 21 Aug 2020 at 22:23

Is ARM going through a steep development/improvement curve at the moment that may yet plateau out like x86 appears to have done ?

HACO · 22 Aug 2020 at 09:13

Donnie Fisher said:
Is ARM going through a steep development/improvement curve at the moment that may yet plateau out like x86 appears to have done ?

Nobody knows the future, from what it seems, it's unlikely to stagnate in the next few years at least.

jigger · 22 Aug 2020 at 10:39

Donnie Fisher said:
Is ARM going through a steep development/improvement curve at the moment that may yet plateau out like x86 appears to have done ?

That will depend on the environment. In a windows PC? In the hands of Nvidia?

0h_no_not_again · 22 Aug 2020 at 18:51

I listened to a interview of Jim Keller by Lex Friedman, and it was really interesting the discussion around x86 and ARM. Zen and K12 (ARM) were developed at the same time, where Zen ended up being heavily influenced by strategies ARM employed. To paraphrase Jim "some things ARM did were very clever, and some things were not. We picked the best bits and applied them to Zen".

It's also interesting K12 was shelved indefinitely, suggesting that x86 still has legs in it.

Anyway, there are probably a handful of people on the planet that can actually weigh in on this, so only time and benchmarks will tell. My 2c is that x86 is here to stay for some time yet.

jigger · 22 Aug 2020 at 19:11

0h_no_not_again said:
I listened to a interview of Jim Keller by Lex Friedman, and it was really interesting the discussion around x86 and ARM. Zen and K12 (ARM) were developed at the same time, where Zen ended up being heavily influenced by strategies ARM employed. To paraphrase Jim "some things ARM did were very clever, and some things were not. We picked the best bits and applied them to Zen".

It's also interesting K12 was shelved indefinitely, suggesting that x86 still has legs in it.

Anyway, there are probably a handful of people on the planet that can actually weigh in on this, so only time and benchmarks will tell. My 2c is that x86 is here to stay for some time yet.

Oh definitely. The shot in the ARM that AMD has given X86 is massive. Over just the last 18 months AMD has more than doubled performance and that looks set to double again over the next.
I can see EPYC doubling socket and core count plus a 30% IPC gain over the next two years.

HACO · 22 Aug 2020 at 19:48

jigger said:
Oh definitely. The shot in the ARM that AMD has given X86 is massive. Over just the last 18 months AMD has more than doubled performance and that looks set to double again over the next.
I can see EPYC doubling socket and core count plus a 30% IPC gain over the next two years.

I think that's very ambitious for AMD. But 15% IPC improvement every 18 months (which seems to be the plan) will make sure ARM (outside of Apple) is not going to surpass x86 in the next 3 years at the earliest.

jigger · 22 Aug 2020 at 19:55

HACO said:
I think that's very ambitious for AMD. But 15% IPC improvement every 18 months (which seems to be the plan) will make sure ARM (outside of Apple) is not going to surpass x86 in the next 3 years at the earliest.

AMD could double core count and sockets now.

HACO · 22 Aug 2020 at 21:25

jigger said:
AMD could double core count and sockets now.

So can ARM. ARM-based manufacturers have access to the same fabrication. It's really performance per core (per watt) that matters.

HACO · 30 Sep 2020 at 17:51

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsex...-ever-the-role-of-the-windows-pc-has-changed/

Microsoft announces x86-64 emulation on ARM.

4K8KW10 · 27 Oct 2020 at 15:48

Arm Says New Neoverse V1, N2 Server CPUs Faster Than Intel, AMD

‘We know the alternative architecture isn’t standing still, but we’re very confident that Neoverse N2 will continue to represent the ultimate in per socket performance and Neoverse V1 will offer the ultimate per thread performance into the future,’ Arm executive Chris Bergey says of the newly disclosed server CPU designs.

Arm has revealed two next-generation Neoverse server CPU designs, saying that the new V1 core for maximum performance and N2 core for scale-out performance will deliver significantly higher performance than processors made by Intel or AMD.

Arm’s new Neoverse disclosures were made as the company claimed significant progress in the data center market, with four of the world’s top seven hyperscalers adopting Arm-based processors for deployments and with Arm-based Fujitsu processors powering Fugaku, the newly minted fastest supercomputer in the world. Arm’s V1 design has already been provided to silicon partners, and the N2 design is already sampling with some partners, though full delivery won’t happen until next year.

“The emergence of Arm in the data center is being powered by many factors: customization, efficiency, ecosystem diversity, but all of that builds on top of performance,” Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s infrastructure business, said in a pre-briefing with journalists and analysts. “If Neoverse wasn’t delivering a significant measurable value proposition you would not see the market adoption and momentum that we are achieving.”

Bergey said the new V1 CPU core — previously code-named Zeus and part of the Neoverse’s new V-series for high single-threaded and machine learning performance — provides a more than 50-percent performance improvement over Arm’s N1 core. The N1 core is currently used to power Amazon Web Services’ Graviton2 processors and Ampere’s upcoming 128-core Altra Max processors, both of which have claimed significant gains over Intel’s and AMD’s server processors.

With performance data from internal estimates, Bergey said an Arm N1 processor with 128 cores already provides higher performance per socket and higher performance per thread over AMD’s 64-core EPYC 7742 processor and Intel’s Xeon 8268 processor. But with a 96-core V1 processor and a 128-core N2 processor, those gains over the AMD and Intel processors increase significantly, he added.

“We know the alternative architecture isn’t standing still, but we’re very confident that Neoverse N2 will continue to represent the ultimate in per socket performance and Neoverse V1 will offer the ultimate per thread performance into the future,” he said.

Along with Arm’s advances in CPU designs, Bergey said the company has also built a solid foundation of software support in the data center, citing support from Red Hat, VMware, SUSE, Oracle Linux, KVM, Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, MongoDB, Apache and other plays in the ecosystem.

https://www.crn.com/news/components...verse-v1-n2-server-cpus-faster-than-intel-amd

Armageus · 27 Oct 2020 at 16:13

4K8KW10 said:
With performance data from internal estimates, Bergey said an Arm N1 processor with 128 cores already provides higher performance per socket and higher performance per thread over AMD’s 64-core EPYC 7742 processor and Intel’s Xeon 8268 processor. But with a 96-core V1 processor and a 128-core N2 processor, those gains over the AMD and Intel processors increase significantly, he added.

Click to expand...

I'd take those results with a mountain of salt... Phoronix paints a very different picture with the 64 core N1 part losing the majority of benchmarks, and a fair proportion of them the Epyc wins due to higher single thread performance (so even a 128 Core N1 part isn't necessarily going to be victorious)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-graviton2&num=8

Milan based Epyc will also be out soon, and arguably given the improvements banded about for the 5xxx Ryzen chips, will likely have a decent single thread uplift as well.

Trick · 30 Oct 2020 at 14:15

Quartz said:
Does no one else remember the Acorn Archimedes?

sure do

Quartz · 30 Oct 2020 at 15:46

Trick said:
sure do

Pure porn!

Rroff · 31 Oct 2020 at 07:21

Was always something about the look of the RISC PCs.

Still have my old 3010 and a SA system running under Red Squirrel though sadly missing a lot of the files from my childhood - none the least I created a nice media player sitting on top of the digital symphony modules which is sadly lost.

vanpeebles · 31 Oct 2020 at 07:27

Lovely collection there Trick! I have a B+, Master, my original a3010 and a StrongARM Risc PC.

Rroff · 31 Oct 2020 at 07:29

Sadly mine got left in my parent's loft when I moved out and the PCBs had turned into green mush by the time I got back to them.

vanpeebles · 31 Oct 2020 at 07:57

Rroff said:
Sadly mine got left in my parent's loft when I moved out and the PCBs had turned into green mush by the time I got back to them.

Gutting, superb machine!

Blackjack Davy · 31 Oct 2020 at 16:17

Trick said:
sure do

Is that your collection? I had at least two of those there I'm envious.

Trick · 1 Nov 2020 at 18:46

Blackjack Davy said:
Is that your collection? I had at least two of those there I'm envious.

that’s my collection of later Acorns - I’ve got a BBC B, Master and Atom as well, plus a whole loft full of other classic 8, 16 and 32bit machines from the 80s and 90s

4K8KW10 · 6 Jan 2021 at 16:30

Huawei is soon going to launch the laptops running on its Kirin 990 SoC. A leaked retail box of the upcoming Huawei Qingyun L410 laptop shows it is powered by Kirin 990, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 14-inch 1080p display with Linux-based Deepin OS 20. : Huawei (reddit.com)

"Huawei is soon going to launch the laptops running on its Kirin 990 SoC. A leaked retail box of the upcoming Huawei Qingyun L410 laptop shows it is powered by Kirin 990, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 14-inch 1080p display with Linux-based Deepin OS 20."

Will this work with Windows? Probably yes, I see no problems to install Windows on it.