[HN Gopher] Ampere AmpereOne Aurora 512 Core AI CPU Announced
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Ampere AmpereOne Aurora 512 Core AI CPU Announced
Author : ksec
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-07-31 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.servethehome.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.servethehome.com)
| ralferoo wrote:
| I wonder if we'll eventually start seeing a trend for chips to
| shrink in size.
|
| The existing Ampere chips are already massive (see previous STH
| videos etc), and most of that is because usually each time they
| double the number of cores, they usually double the number of
| memory lanes and IO lanes like PCI etc. But that's squashing ever
| more heat into a tiny (well, not so tiny with these chips) space.
|
| I'm sure there are some good use cases where you might need that
| many cores on a single chip, like if there are lots of cache
| dependencies between all the threads, but I suspect the majority
| of these chips will end up carved up into smaller VMs and it
| seems to me that a multi-chip solution is probably more optimal
| for cooling and air flow.
|
| I guess the counter argument is that chips designed using
| chiplets could still have a reasonable amount of space between
| each chiplet on the chip to allow each a greater cooling surface
| area and presenting one flat metal surface for cooling might
| perform better than several chips that potentially don't lie
| exactly co-planar.
| bhouston wrote:
| I think we already have that no?
|
| BIG.little with ARM, efficiency cores with Apple, 4C/5C cores
| from AMD. IF you want more cores, but want to do it efficiency,
| we have that tech now.
|
| AMD is building out full 4C/5C-based CPUs where everything is
| efficiency cores, but it gives them more overall cores.
| ralferoo wrote:
| That's not quite what I meant, because these are still just
| single chip machines.
|
| I was specifically thinking of data centre use where more
| cores are obviously desirable, and in previous generations
| multi-chip designs were common e.g. dual-Xenon all the way up
| to I think quad-Xenon motherboards.
|
| With the rise in core counts recently, most designs have gone
| back to single-CPU motherboards, but I wonder if we'll decide
| that 64, 128 or whatever cores per chip is enough, and just
| have more chips on a motherboard instead. Would give more
| flexibility for upgrades or replacing faulty CPUs, as well as
| probably being cheaper to make and easier to keep cool.
|
| We can already do multiple 40GB/s interconnects from on-chip
| to outside the PC using PCIe/USB-C 3.2, so that kind of fast
| bus between separate chips on the same motherboard should be
| achievable for when you actually need cache sharing, and I
| suspect that with appropriate core-affinity settings, most
| jobs don't require all that much shared cache access.
| commercialnix wrote:
| > but I suspect the majority of these chips will end up carved
| up into smaller VMs
|
| As someone who works with BSD Jails and preferably (though not
| as often) illumos Unix Zones, I look down my nose at those who
| would run VMs on these chips.
|
| My org's competitors should go ahead and use VMs.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Are Ampere CPUs/mobos available to the public to buy?
| aseipp wrote:
| Yes, you can buy Ampere Altra systems; you can get a 128 core
| (2.6GHz) + mobo bundle for about $2.5k USD, and it should be
| "SystemReady" which is a fancy term for "boots generic UEFI
| images": https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-
| altrad8ud-1l2t-q64-22-amp...
|
| Note that Altra is a years-old core at this point, Neoverse N1.
| For ST workloads you can much better with a more recent design.
| But it still has a high thread count w/o SMT, and is
| competitive enough at its power envelope to work great as a
| general server or CI runner or whatever (note the lower clock
| speeds.)
|
| The AmpereOne line, though, which is their own custom design,
| and the basis of this new announcement -- is and has been
| unobtainium for mere mortals, despite the fact it's been
| shipping for a while. I don't even know of a single cloud
| provider offering it today. It's a tough market because
| vertically integrated suppliers like Google or Amazon are now
| developing their own ARM cores. It took a while for Altra to
| become consumer available though with options like that
| motherboard, so who knows what the timelines are for AmpereOne
| to hit consumer shelves.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| I can Jeff Geerling salivating at the chance to benchmark these
| things.
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