Announced a year ago, Ampere Computing is now bringing new Altra server CPUs with up to 128 cores. The focus is also on the 5 nm successor, where off-the-shelf ARM cores should no longer be used, but a completely in-house development, which should, however, remain compatible with the ARM-ISA.
A completely detached solo effort should not pay off for the still young CPU manufacturer Ampere. At the moment they are gradually gaining a foothold with every larger cloud provider, because all future CPUs should be tailored to this. There will be no general purpose, but highly specialized solutions that are more in competition with the in-house developments of Amazon with Graviton, for example, than with classic AMD and Intel server CPUs. But it is mainly against this, already with the current model series.
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Because before the 5 nm solution with more than 128 cores comes, it is Altra Max's turn. The manufacturer has now commented a little more on these, and extensive data sheets have been published to match the announcement. Accordingly, there will be up to ten processors with 96 to 128 cores that fit into the same TDP budget of a maximum of 250 watts.
Twice as many cores as an AMD Epyc 7742 bring up to 60 percent more performance. At first glance, that's not too much, but Ampere does without SMT in the Altras, so that the bottom line is that 128 threads compete against 128 threads.
In order to accommodate the significantly increased number of cores in the same package and power budget, however, it was not possible without a red pencil. The maximum clock rate drops from 3.3 GHz for the 80-core models to 3.2 GHz for 96 cores and 3.0 GHz for 128 cores; according to the data sheets, Ampere has also halved the system-level cache from 32 to 16 MB . This saves electricity and space, but in certain scenarios it also costs a bit of performance. The trappings, from the memory interface to the PCIe 4.0 lanes, remain identical.
With the 5-nm-successor goes you your own way
For the 5 nm successor with the code name Siryn, which was also announced a year ago, Ampere Computing surprised with the news that it was saying goodbye to ARM Neoverse. There are still no details at all about the approach of independent development of processor cores, although many former Intel experts who were responsible for Haswell and Broadwell at the time, led by CTO Atiq Bajwa, are working in the field. Now they want to move the focus even further away from the general applications, for which ARM Neoverse continues to stand even with the new generations, towards the specialist areas. Because there, paired with current technologies such as DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, a lot of performance can be gained. What that looks like in the end will not be clearer until next year 2022 at the earliest.
