'Back in 2015, we reviewed the 40 nm 8-core X-Gene 1 (2.4 GHz, 45W), which found a home in HP's Moonshot processors. Performance wise the SoC was on par with the Atom C2750 (8 cores @ 2 GHz), but consumed twice as much power, which in our review to an overall negative conclusion.'
I'm reading the first paragraph and it's already barely readable. Wonder how the rest will be. HP's Moonshot processors = HP's Moonshot servers ... which in our review to an overall negative conclusion = which in our review led to an overall negative conclusion
Just like the HP Moonshot, no one at all. It'll cost more, use more power and perform less work than a cheaper Xeon if we can go by all the other Arm server attempts. Someone like Facebook might buy a few to serve a need that involves some specialized load but probably not. But ultimately I suspect it'll go the same way all the others have, they'll tape out, get to the test servers, realize no ones going to buy it and then dump it like a hot potato.
There's a growing pile of ARM server chips that never were at this point. ARM's attempts to develop a real server spec that uses ACPI, UEFI and others might have a chance down the road but all these early attempts have been underwhelming and total failures and I suspect that's going to continue. Ultimately if one of them succeeds Intel will just pull a generation forward 6 months or cut prices so that it never has a chance.
Is applied micro's server CPU still relevant? With AMD cores finally competitive, and their bargain basement pricing, most of the motivation for ARM servers is gone, the power advantages is negligible in IO heavy environments, and performance abysmal in other cases.
Plus with AMD you're getting tried and true x86 compatible performance. The risk to jump to an ARM server now just doesn't make any sense.
@ webdoctors: Precisely. The whole noise for ARM servers started as a response to AMD's Bulldozer fiasco. Vendors want an alternative even if they only buy Intel, as a way of getting Intel to price their parts appropriately (See Dell, circa 2005?). I expect a lot of the noise Microsoft is making re. ARM servers is also to this end. Intel has raised prices on server parts following AMD's de facto exit from the market. With Naples, this changes, at least in certain segments of the market. HPC will probably want intel for AVX-256/512, but ARM hasn't a chance in that market yet.
Here's the other thing: Intel and AMD make the same core for 3 different markets: laptop, desktop, and server. Say what you will about shrinking PC market, it's still a massive market in which to amortize your development costs. Unless ARM vendors can plug the exact same core in multiple markets like Qualcomm using Falcor in both phones and servers, or ARM builds a beefy core for anyone to license, x86 will have the economy of scale that ARM does not. Building custom cores for server will not be profitable. x86 won in servers vs DEC, SPARC, IBM etc because it was able to amortize the cost, and was able therefore to justify more resources into pushing performance/features while keeping costs down. Of the big iron mainframes, only IBM remains (as I understand, Oracle has all but killed SPARC). For how long remains to be seen. Again, volumes is the issue.
I think AMD is only competitive against Intel, price-wise. I doubt either of them are competitive against ARM chips in terms of pricing. At least compared to these latest and upcoming ARM server chips.
And I'm basing this on the fact that Intel wasn't anywhere near competitive in terms of pricing in the mobile market with ARM. So I imagine this will be the case for servers, too, especially considering that both Intel and AMD will charge premiums for their server chips.
@Krysto: Intel did follow a "contra-revenue" strategy in the mobile market. As I understand it, they were effectively giving it away free. Furthermore, the fallacy here is that the server market is not the same as the mobile market. Server is driven by Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In a rack, the CPU accounts for ~30% of the cost of acquisition. Datacenters are provisioned for a certain performance; for the sake of this discussion, let's assume it's transactions/second and response/latency. The ARM vendors so far have been throwing lots of weak cores (low IPC) at the problem (not sure what Qualcomm's doing). The problem with this approach is that while it does well at spec int rate, its performance on actual workloads is lacking. To get the same transactions/second, you need to scale up to more cores, which translates into more racks. At some point, your TCO equation gets out of hand, because adding more racks costs more money; even if the CPU were free, it would be cheaper to use Intel. Weak cores may have worse latency than strong cores depending on the workload, and in that case, you're hosed.
This is precisely why Atom servers and AMD's Bulldozer-based servers have little market share. AMD had huge incentive to price their product competitively and yet, they found themselves effectively priced out of the market. This strategy of many weak cores might get you 1% of the server market, if at all, and be sure that Intel will price Atom servers to undercut any ARM vendor that's a threat. Not to make money, but to keep ARM out of the data center.
AMD is highly unlikely to charge big premiums for their server chips. They want to grow market share; they've even stated as much. And their cost structure is lower than Qualcomm's or Cavium's as the same design cost gets amortized over multiple markets (see previous post). The way I see it, AMD's resurgence in x86 has pushed the ARM server market back by another 5 years.
PS: As to your comment "I think AMD is only competitive against Intel, price-wise." That's certainly not true. Price alone cannot get you into the server market for reasons mentioned earlier. (AMD tried with Bulldozer). Naples has a lot of things going for it that Intel does not offer: 8-channel vs 4 (Broadwell)/6 (Purley), 128 PCIe 3 lanes in 1P, 64 in 2P (vs intel's 44/88 in 1P/2P), solid power numbers, very competitive single threaded performance*, and doesn't need an external chipset. And, according to reports, AMD claims 170GB/s bandwidth vs the rather paltry numbers posted for X-gene. AMD is a solid option for applications that need a lot of cores, lots of I/O bandwidth, and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Intel's 32-core offering is likely to have an eye-watering price, given that unlike AMD, it builds all 32 on the same die, necessitating spectacular yields.
The obvious choice would be a Chinese company like Phytium. I would assume that legally this is OK, those with these high-tech sales it's always somewhat random whether the US govt will or will not see some security concern to the sale.
The A1100 was terribly late, slow and underperforming. Since Naples is around the corner, and AMD has very limited resources, I think AMD will focus on x86.
If I recall correctly, A1100 was supposed to be a development vehicle for the K12 ARM core that AMD had planned for 2017. I think the plan was to drop k12 into the same platform or something like that. As ARM software stack was immature, this was necessary for OS debug etc. I don't think it was expected to sell in any great quantity. There's no official word on the topic, other than they prioritizing x86 over ARM, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines.
@Article: "MACOM, the new owners of the X-Gene IP, claim that the new X-Gene 3 is a totally different beast. The main performance claim is that it should be >6 times faster in SPECintRate than X-Gene 1 or 2. That performance increase is mostly because the new SoC has 4 times as many cores: 32 rather than 8."
Well, there is also, as the article states, a bump in frequency from 2.4GHz to 3.3GHz. Correspondingly, we would expect to see a 37.5% increase in per thread performance based solely on frequency increase. That leads us to a 5.5x performance increase from the standard MOAR CORES and MOAR Hz approaches. The 12.5% per thread IPC improvement is nice, but I was hoping for a little more given the state they were in before. Still, if they managed to avoid the MOAR POWER drawback that often comes with the MOAR CORES/Hz approach, the this will be a nice little chip.
Spec int rate, 2006 at least, is a bit of a dopey benchmark in that, beyond a certain number of cores, it turns into a bandwidth benchmark. i.e. memory bandwidth matters more than core performance or even memory latency. That's how Cavium is able to post half-decent scores in that benchmark. Their single-thread performance is worse than ARM A53 but they throw a lot of cores at it and a good number of memory channels.
@Krysto: MACOM is trying to get rid of the xgene line. At a price, if possible. I think that's smart, as was Broadcom's move to sell off Vulcan to Cavium. Only Qualcomm has the resources (mostly $$) to aggressively push ARM into the server space (maybe, if their shareholders are willing to bear the losses). And I'm confident it's going to be a hard slog. ARM has to bring something fundamental to the table that x86 does not, and cannot, and I haven't seen it yet. Other than a nebulous idea of 'competition'. Honestly, if I wanted to change ISAs, I'd go with POWER. They have the performance, and have demonstrated they know what they're doing (they invented the field, pretty much).
It is funny how they don't post the TDP of this xgene 3 chip. If you ask any data center operator the most important thing is performance per watt. From my personal experience, when ARM processors attempt to catch-up with the Intel SPECint rate per thread performance their power consumption shoots up way over Intel CPU's power consumption(atleast 2X). Intel Broadwell TDP is very difficult to beat and in data centers this becomes a huge problem for ARM processors. In addition when you pack 32+ cores in single chip and all the cores start doing memory transfers, the memory channels will saturate in only 16 cores. So there is no real advantage of having 32 core chip for memory bandwidth hungry apps. In fact it is bad thing to have so many cores in a chip for those apps. Another important things these ARM vendors never tell you is floating point performance of all ARM cpus is very bad compared to Intel. In most of the real life workloads the floating point performance matters and Intel is unbeatable in that category so far. The HPC customers may augment their systems with GPUs and FPGAs but most of the data center customers don't do that although it has started to change . Even if GPUs and FPGAs are used in increasing number, the ARM CPUs don't provide any advantage over Intel . So the only thing Intel has to do to maintain its market share is lower its price. This will surely drive all ARM vendors out of business because their only offering so far is lower price.
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milli - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
'Back in 2015, we reviewed the 40 nm 8-core X-Gene 1 (2.4 GHz, 45W), which found a home in HP's Moonshot processors. Performance wise the SoC was on par with the Atom C2750 (8 cores @ 2 GHz), but consumed twice as much power, which in our review to an overall negative conclusion.'I'm reading the first paragraph and it's already barely readable. Wonder how the rest will be.
HP's Moonshot processors = HP's Moonshot servers
... which in our review to an overall negative conclusion = which in our review led to an overall negative conclusion
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Sorry, I take responsibility for that - I edited the piece last night.Yojimbo - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
I wonder who will end up buying the X-Gene line, as Macom said they will divest themselves of it.rahvin - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Just like the HP Moonshot, no one at all. It'll cost more, use more power and perform less work than a cheaper Xeon if we can go by all the other Arm server attempts. Someone like Facebook might buy a few to serve a need that involves some specialized load but probably not. But ultimately I suspect it'll go the same way all the others have, they'll tape out, get to the test servers, realize no ones going to buy it and then dump it like a hot potato.There's a growing pile of ARM server chips that never were at this point. ARM's attempts to develop a real server spec that uses ACPI, UEFI and others might have a chance down the road but all these early attempts have been underwhelming and total failures and I suspect that's going to continue. Ultimately if one of them succeeds Intel will just pull a generation forward 6 months or cut prices so that it never has a chance.
webdoctors - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Is applied micro's server CPU still relevant? With AMD cores finally competitive, and their bargain basement pricing, most of the motivation for ARM servers is gone, the power advantages is negligible in IO heavy environments, and performance abysmal in other cases.Plus with AMD you're getting tried and true x86 compatible performance. The risk to jump to an ARM server now just doesn't make any sense.
deltaFx2 - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
@ webdoctors: Precisely. The whole noise for ARM servers started as a response to AMD's Bulldozer fiasco. Vendors want an alternative even if they only buy Intel, as a way of getting Intel to price their parts appropriately (See Dell, circa 2005?). I expect a lot of the noise Microsoft is making re. ARM servers is also to this end. Intel has raised prices on server parts following AMD's de facto exit from the market. With Naples, this changes, at least in certain segments of the market. HPC will probably want intel for AVX-256/512, but ARM hasn't a chance in that market yet.Here's the other thing: Intel and AMD make the same core for 3 different markets: laptop, desktop, and server. Say what you will about shrinking PC market, it's still a massive market in which to amortize your development costs. Unless ARM vendors can plug the exact same core in multiple markets like Qualcomm using Falcor in both phones and servers, or ARM builds a beefy core for anyone to license, x86 will have the economy of scale that ARM does not. Building custom cores for server will not be profitable. x86 won in servers vs DEC, SPARC, IBM etc because it was able to amortize the cost, and was able therefore to justify more resources into pushing performance/features while keeping costs down. Of the big iron mainframes, only IBM remains (as I understand, Oracle has all but killed SPARC). For how long remains to be seen. Again, volumes is the issue.
Krysto - Friday, March 24, 2017 - link
I think AMD is only competitive against Intel, price-wise. I doubt either of them are competitive against ARM chips in terms of pricing. At least compared to these latest and upcoming ARM server chips.Krysto - Friday, March 24, 2017 - link
And I'm basing this on the fact that Intel wasn't anywhere near competitive in terms of pricing in the mobile market with ARM. So I imagine this will be the case for servers, too, especially considering that both Intel and AMD will charge premiums for their server chips.deltaFx2 - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
@Krysto: Intel did follow a "contra-revenue" strategy in the mobile market. As I understand it, they were effectively giving it away free. Furthermore, the fallacy here is that the server market is not the same as the mobile market. Server is driven by Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In a rack, the CPU accounts for ~30% of the cost of acquisition. Datacenters are provisioned for a certain performance; for the sake of this discussion, let's assume it's transactions/second and response/latency. The ARM vendors so far have been throwing lots of weak cores (low IPC) at the problem (not sure what Qualcomm's doing). The problem with this approach is that while it does well at spec int rate, its performance on actual workloads is lacking. To get the same transactions/second, you need to scale up to more cores, which translates into more racks. At some point, your TCO equation gets out of hand, because adding more racks costs more money; even if the CPU were free, it would be cheaper to use Intel. Weak cores may have worse latency than strong cores depending on the workload, and in that case, you're hosed.This is precisely why Atom servers and AMD's Bulldozer-based servers have little market share. AMD had huge incentive to price their product competitively and yet, they found themselves effectively priced out of the market. This strategy of many weak cores might get you 1% of the server market, if at all, and be sure that Intel will price Atom servers to undercut any ARM vendor that's a threat. Not to make money, but to keep ARM out of the data center.
AMD is highly unlikely to charge big premiums for their server chips. They want to grow market share; they've even stated as much. And their cost structure is lower than Qualcomm's or Cavium's as the same design cost gets amortized over multiple markets (see previous post). The way I see it, AMD's resurgence in x86 has pushed the ARM server market back by another 5 years.
Additional reading: http://www.realworldtech.com/vax-cpu-economics/ You may find this insightful.
deltaFx2 - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
PS: As to your comment "I think AMD is only competitive against Intel, price-wise." That's certainly not true. Price alone cannot get you into the server market for reasons mentioned earlier. (AMD tried with Bulldozer). Naples has a lot of things going for it that Intel does not offer: 8-channel vs 4 (Broadwell)/6 (Purley), 128 PCIe 3 lanes in 1P, 64 in 2P (vs intel's 44/88 in 1P/2P), solid power numbers, very competitive single threaded performance*, and doesn't need an external chipset. And, according to reports, AMD claims 170GB/s bandwidth vs the rather paltry numbers posted for X-gene. AMD is a solid option for applications that need a lot of cores, lots of I/O bandwidth, and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Intel's 32-core offering is likely to have an eye-watering price, given that unlike AMD, it builds all 32 on the same die, necessitating spectacular yields.* Except in AVX-256/512.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Macom recently claimed they have interest and will complete the sale within the 100-day period after closing (Jan. 23 IIRC) they originally promised.Yojimbo - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Macom is divesting themselves of the business. I wasn't asking who would buy the chips, but rather who would buy the business.name99 - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
The obvious choice would be a Chinese company like Phytium. I would assume that legally this is OK, those with these high-tech sales it's always somewhat random whether the US govt will or will not see some security concern to the sale.tsk2k - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Okay that's all well and good, but what fps will I get in crysis?Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Week 53??What happened to AMD? They released the A1100; did they abandon ARM after that?
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
The A1100 was terribly late, slow and underperforming. Since Naples is around the corner, and AMD has very limited resources, I think AMD will focus on x86.rahvin - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
I thought I remember reading that AMD's ARM efforts are dead at this point.EasyListening - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
They tried for a few years but went back to x86 and the rest is recent history.deltaFx2 - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
If I recall correctly, A1100 was supposed to be a development vehicle for the K12 ARM core that AMD had planned for 2017. I think the plan was to drop k12 into the same platform or something like that. As ARM software stack was immature, this was necessary for OS debug etc. I don't think it was expected to sell in any great quantity. There's no official word on the topic, other than they prioritizing x86 over ARM, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
@Article: "MACOM, the new owners of the X-Gene IP, claim that the new X-Gene 3 is a totally different beast. The main performance claim is that it should be >6 times faster in SPECintRate than X-Gene 1 or 2. That performance increase is mostly because the new SoC has 4 times as many cores: 32 rather than 8."Well, there is also, as the article states, a bump in frequency from 2.4GHz to 3.3GHz. Correspondingly, we would expect to see a 37.5% increase in per thread performance based solely on frequency increase. That leads us to a 5.5x performance increase from the standard MOAR CORES and MOAR Hz approaches. The 12.5% per thread IPC improvement is nice, but I was hoping for a little more given the state they were in before. Still, if they managed to avoid the MOAR POWER drawback that often comes with the MOAR CORES/Hz approach, the this will be a nice little chip.
deltaFx2 - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
Spec int rate, 2006 at least, is a bit of a dopey benchmark in that, beyond a certain number of cores, it turns into a bandwidth benchmark. i.e. memory bandwidth matters more than core performance or even memory latency. That's how Cavium is able to post half-decent scores in that benchmark. Their single-thread performance is worse than ARM A53 but they throw a lot of cores at it and a good number of memory channels.Krysto - Friday, March 24, 2017 - link
Good to see it's quite competitive at 14nm, too. It will be interesting to see how it compares against Qualcomm's 10nm Centriq 2400.However, I do think that it would be smart of them to release X-Gene 4 on 7nm, 2nd half of 2019 at the latest.
deltaFx2 - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
@Krysto: MACOM is trying to get rid of the xgene line. At a price, if possible. I think that's smart, as was Broadcom's move to sell off Vulcan to Cavium. Only Qualcomm has the resources (mostly $$) to aggressively push ARM into the server space (maybe, if their shareholders are willing to bear the losses). And I'm confident it's going to be a hard slog. ARM has to bring something fundamental to the table that x86 does not, and cannot, and I haven't seen it yet. Other than a nebulous idea of 'competition'. Honestly, if I wanted to change ISAs, I'd go with POWER. They have the performance, and have demonstrated they know what they're doing (they invented the field, pretty much).Chakravaka - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It is funny how they don't post the TDP of this xgene 3 chip. If you ask any data center operator the most important thing is performance per watt.From my personal experience, when ARM processors attempt to catch-up with the Intel SPECint rate per thread performance their power consumption shoots up way over Intel CPU's power consumption(atleast 2X). Intel Broadwell TDP is very difficult to beat and in data centers this becomes a huge problem for ARM processors. In addition when you pack 32+ cores in single chip and all the cores start doing memory transfers, the memory channels will saturate in only 16 cores. So there is no real advantage of having 32 core chip for memory bandwidth hungry apps. In fact it is bad thing to have so many cores in a chip for those apps.
Another important things these ARM vendors never tell you is floating point performance of all ARM cpus is very bad compared to Intel. In most of the real life workloads the floating point performance matters and Intel is unbeatable in that category so far. The HPC customers may augment their systems with GPUs and FPGAs but most of the data center customers don't do that although it has started to change . Even if GPUs and FPGAs are used in increasing number, the ARM CPUs don't provide any advantage over Intel . So the only thing Intel has to do to maintain its market share is lower its price. This will surely drive all ARM vendors out of business because their only offering so far is lower price.