[HN Gopher] Turing RK1 is 2x faster, 1.8x pricier than Pi 5
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       Turing RK1 is 2x faster, 1.8x pricier than Pi 5
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2024-04-26 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
        
       | jmakov wrote:
       | Why? For that price you get a used laptop with higher perf.
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | Depends on how long you want to run it and your utility costs,
         | performance/watt is good on newer chips like these.
        
           | JudasGoat wrote:
           | I wish it were easier to quantify the energy cost of building
           | these newer more efficient devices, as opposed to repurposing
           | existing hardware. When you add e-waste to the equation, it
           | gets cloudier.
        
         | dragontamer wrote:
         | Intel Xeon D-2700* or 1700 SoC are the preferred "low power
         | servers" in practice. Yes, they idle at 25W, but I bet you that
         | the Xeon D-2500 will have more performance than 10x Rasp. Pi 5.
         | 
         | More importantly: there will be server-class features like out-
         | of-band management/IPMI, 10Gbase-T ports, etc. etc.
        
           | geerlingguy wrote:
           | Note that this board runs RK1's (which use the RK3588 SoC),
           | not Raspberry Pis.
           | 
           | It burns 18.5W with CPU cores maxed out, producing 224 Gflops
           | of compute (see:
           | https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/27).
           | Efficiency-wise, it's a little more power efficient than at
           | least last-gen AMD/Intel chips, and a little less than Ampere
           | CPUs and Apple's M1. I haven't had a chance to compare to
           | M2/M3 for power efficiency yet.
           | 
           | The Turing Pi 2 has a BMC that allows out-of-band management,
           | and the firmware is fairly stable at this point, and the
           | community helped build a nice CLI for it so IMO it's even
           | nicer (from automation/remote sysadmin aspect) than IPMI for
           | some things. There's no remote VNC/display, but these aren't
           | meant to have displays (even though node 1 has HDMI routed to
           | a connector on the back).
           | 
           | The most crippling thing for my use cases is the single 1
           | Gbps connection externally, and the internal 1 Gbps Ethernet
           | switching. It'd be nice if it did at least 2.5 Gbps.
        
             | dragontamer wrote:
             | Xeons / AMD EPYCs are measured in (low single-digit)
             | TFlops, not GFlops.
             | 
             | AVX512 gets places, especially with Fused Multiply-
             | accumulate (FMA) instructions and multiple pipelines.
             | 
             | That the thing though: TFlops is still "weak" because GPU
             | market crushes Linpack so hard its just not comparable. But
             | I'd assume that your typical Xeon D will run circles around
             | these other cores watt-for-watt.
             | 
             | Its the GPUs that Xeon D is competing with and struggling
             | with. But if we're talking about a bunch of CPU-style
             | compute (non-Linpack workloads), or even the occassional
             | matrix-multiply, its hard to beat Xeon or EPYC in cost and
             | power-efficiency.
             | 
             | And you certainly ain't gonna beat a Xeon or EPYC with tiny
             | ARM chips right now.
        
               | justinclift wrote:
               | > And you certainly ain't gonna beat a Xeon or EPYC with
               | tiny ARM chips right now.
               | 
               | Do you include Apple's M family in that list of tiny ARM
               | chips?
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | That's an edge case. But I'm mostly talking about RK1 or
               | Rasp. Pi 5.
               | 
               | I'm well aware of "large" ARM chips like Fujitsu A64FX
               | ARM that did well (when it came out) in terms of Linpack
               | performance, thanks to hugely efficient designs like HBM
               | and 512-bit SVE.
               | 
               | I'm not very well aware of what Apple M1 offers to the
               | table, I know some people are experimenting with it but
               | its a far larger chip than RK1 or Rasp. Pi. But its
               | probably smaller than A64FX.
               | 
               | I know that Apple M1 has only 128-bit vectors though, so
               | that's a big penalty vs AVX512 or even the older Fujitsu
               | A64FX. I'd expect them to be bad at Linpack / Matrix
               | multiplication as this is where SIMD shines exceptionally
               | well... and AVX512 on Xeon is a very good SIMD
               | implementation.
               | 
               | I recognize Apple M1 has multiple 128-bit pipelines that
               | operate in parallel per core, so its better than it
               | looks, but there's a huge power-efficiency advantage to
               | 512-bit sized vector units in the Linpack-style matrix-
               | multiplication code.
        
               | tubs wrote:
               | M chips has some matrix multipliers in hardware as well.
        
             | chokolad wrote:
             | > Note that this board runs RK1's (which use the RK3588
             | SoC), not Raspberry Pis.
             | 
             | Turing Pi 2 was designed to run Paspberry Pi CM4 via
             | adapter as well as Jetson Nano (?). RK1 is somewhat recent
             | development that was shipped way after Turing Pi2 release.
        
       | shrubble wrote:
       | For 'serious' use I would always recommend ECC RAM.
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | If you're not running in two independent regions of tier 4 data
         | centers, are you even really serious? /s
         | 
         | There are 'serious' applications of technology that can
         | tolerate memory faults.
        
           | kevindamm wrote:
           | only two? you know you should have N+2 deployment for real
           | redundancy
        
             | scheme271 wrote:
             | Only if N+2 is an odd number, otherwise you may end up with
             | a split brain scenario
        
           | margalabargala wrote:
           | > There are 'serious' applications of technology that can
           | tolerate memory faults.
           | 
           | We can define "serious" use to mean "use where memory faults
           | would be more expensive than buying ECC RAM" :)
        
       | kkielhofner wrote:
       | > It may be an irrational hobby
       | 
       | Refreshing to hear someone just come out and say it. I don't get
       | it but hey, I'm into all kinds of weird stuff that doesn't make
       | sense either.
       | 
       | Just don't try to attempt some argument the capability,
       | performance, or even power usage makes any practical sense. It
       | doesn't.
        
         | baq wrote:
         | It certainly makes for a fun homelab to set up a bare metal
         | cluster of say k8s in a desk drawer, where Pis usually end up
         | anyway.
        
       | foobarian wrote:
       | I think there need to be some tiny Lego or similar figurines
       | operating those tiny blades on those tiny racks :-D
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | I love the idea of Lego minifigs posed inside a chassis for
         | these compute module cluster boards, like they're IT workers in
         | a datacenter.
         | 
         | Every time you pull a server and pop the lid, they're in there
         | working.
         | 
         | (Maybe not for production, lest a minifig get sucked into a
         | fan, taking down a mission-critical cat picture sharing app.)
        
       | ianburrell wrote:
       | It looks like RK1 is only compatible with the Turing Pi 2 4-slot
       | board. I was hoping that it was CM4 compatible. Module faster
       | than Pi5 before CM5 has come out would be useful.
        
         | scheme271 wrote:
         | I think the power draw is going to be too high to be CM4
         | compatible.
        
           | ianburrell wrote:
           | It looks like the RTK1 has the exact power draw, 7W, of CM4.
           | 
           | It seems that the carrier board is same as Nvidia Jetson.
        
       | ianburrell wrote:
       | I wish that the half-width 10" rack was more popular in the US. I
       | got the impression that they are more popular in Europea.
       | 
       | It should be a good size for home networking gear and small
       | servers. Also, it should be possible to mount 10" device in 19"
       | rack. I don't think it is possible to mount two together.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | Back in the day some people tried to go the other way. Half
         | depth servers that were light enough to fit into musician's
         | audio racks, which also tend to be rather small affairs of 6-12
         | units tall. Noise however is often the problem with these
         | things. Substantially because the 1-2u height leads to comical
         | fans.
         | 
         | I suppose that servers would tend to be taller in the half-
         | width racks?
        
       | hinkley wrote:
       | The original one of these was 6 slots wasn't it? How did we end
       | up with 4 in the last two generations? Bandwidth concerns?
        
         | redundantly wrote:
         | You're probably thinking of the DeskPi board.
         | 
         | https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-super6c-raspberry-pi-cm4-...
         | 
         | It's a different product.
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | No but that one is interesting.
           | 
           | I believe Jeff is how I heard about Turing in the first place
           | (or at least the first time I saw their stuff working.)
           | 
           | Sure enough he still has the old videos up and I was wrong;
           | it had 7 slots not 6, which means the new one loses almost
           | half its slots, and explains some of my remembered
           | disappointment.
           | 
           | https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-
           | cluster-...
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-26 23:01 UTC)