Claiming >2x and >3x performance vs Xeon 8380 systems sounds great right up until you realize that AMD’s Milan platform absolutely trounces these same Xeon parts in every non-AVX512 workload. The real question is how will they stack up against Genoa as it’ll be released around the same time?
Trounces yea but only by ~50%, so if they are offering 2-3x performance increases that would put it very well ahead so the real question is how much of a performance increase do the new EPYC’s get.
Who cares about Epyc? Amazon's Graviton3 and Ampere's massive chips are beating the pants off both Epyc and Xeon in cost/performance and is either straight up faster or slightly slower in raw performance.
Both Amazon's and Ampere's chips cannot beat in cost/performance any other CPU, because their price is an infinity, if you are a small business or an individual, because nobody will sell you any of them.
There are a few server CPUs with ARM cores that are available at retail, e.g. from Broadcom or NXP, but those have worse performance per dollar than many AMD or Intel chips.
The only CPUs with ARM cores which have better performance per dollar than any AMD or Intel chip are those at the lowest endpoint of the performance range, when the entire server must cost under $200, or maybe at most up to $300, and where Chinese CPUs with ARM cores, e.g. Rockchip RK3588 or RK3568, have an unbeatable performance per dollar.
In a year or two, things might change a lot and there might appear good server options with Armv9 CPUs, but we are not there yet.
They can absolutely beat in cost/performance other CPUs in completely meaningful ways - run your job on c7g and c6i and compare whether you are getting more performance from $0.284/hr c7g.4xlarge or $0.2822/hr c6i.4xlarge.
Using those instances is a good choice for people who do not know how to select and manage their own servers, but those who do know can achieve a much lower cost than when using a cloud.
Regarding the cost of the cloud instances, we cannot know how well the prices offered to customers reflect the true cost of buying and operating such servers.
For a large company like Amazon, not sharing their profits with a middleman like AMD or Intel can be a sufficient financial advantage to make them use their own CPUs, even if they do not have any technical advantage.
RK3588, with quadruple Cortex-A76, has the same speed as the Intel 4-core Jasper Lake Pentium Silver or Celeron CPUs, but a complete computer with RK3588, at $150 - $300 is about $100 cheaper than a similarly-equipped computer with Jasper Lake.
The cheapest computers with an AMD Zen or Intel Core CPUs are about 50% faster in single-thread than Cortex-A76, but their price is at least double.
Neither Intel Jasper Lake (Pentium N6005 / Celeron N5105) nor RK3588 can be recommended as personal computers, but for cheap servers, e.g. routers or NAS, or for home theaters, they are OK.
Ampere is freely purchasable on common market. So if you like, you can use it. On the other hand I'm afraid their cache arch will not make them competitive for HPC job in comparison with neither intel nor amd.
That's actually not true. Given the almost similar pricing between Graviton3 instances and AMD instances on AWS, the Graviton3 appeal will be of little interest to most organizations.
Can you please point out the retail devices with ARM laptop or desktop chips that deliver good performance and efficiency without an Apple logo? Maybe the DIY desktop ARM chips that deliver better performance per watt than Zen 3 and better performance per dollar than Alder Lake? ARM server is pretty interesting, but x86 is still competitive.
The primary reason why x86 chips are bad is because AMD and Intel are fighting the GHz wars. Doubling clock speeds require a quadrupling in transistors, if there is a hardware frequency limit, or more than an octupling in power if there isn’t a hardware frequency limit. With ARM chips running at 3/5 the frequency of x86, it only makes sense that they are smaller and significantly more power efficient. People like to point out that the x86 ISA is bloated with legacy instruction sets, but the bloat is less than 5% on modern processors. If we take into account that x86 processes instructions poorly relative to ARM, you may hit a 10% efficiency, which while measurable, isn’t that significant. Also, if you care about ISA problems, then RISC-V should be used.
You have not idea how the thigs work. Increasing of the frequency does not require increase in the transistor count. Exactly the opposite, you runing same transistor at higher frequency. M1 ultra has 114b transistors, and is slower than single 5950x(19b) + rtx 3090ti(28.3). Imagine to be slower while waste so much transistors. This is bexause the lower clock speeds
lemurbutton isnt drunk, hes just an apple fanboy who posts pretty much the same praise for apple every time and thinks m1 is the best and only cpu out there
x86 is about as exciting as it has ever been if you look at the next two years of upcoming products. Until a common boot method and wide driver support exists for ARM it is the preserve of fixed products with limited choice... Like the 70s and early 80s but now we have better options, like the well established x86 market.
This wrong, many Pro Tech sites dedicated to enterprise or other segments of server market, realized that in average actual Xeon is exactly on pair with Milan, doing a serious comparison with real world SW and real world workloads. So you are absolurely wrong. In fact actual Xeon is selling at record level, Milan nope.
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noobmaster69 - Tuesday, May 31, 2022 - link
Claiming >2x and >3x performance vs Xeon 8380 systems sounds great right up until you realize that AMD’s Milan platform absolutely trounces these same Xeon parts in every non-AVX512 workload. The real question is how will they stack up against Genoa as it’ll be released around the same time?Lakados - Tuesday, May 31, 2022 - link
Trounces yea but only by ~50%, so if they are offering 2-3x performance increases that would put it very well ahead so the real question is how much of a performance increase do the new EPYC’s get.lemurbutton - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Who cares about Epyc? Amazon's Graviton3 and Ampere's massive chips are beating the pants off both Epyc and Xeon in cost/performance and is either straight up faster or slightly slower in raw performance.AdrianBc - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Both Amazon's and Ampere's chips cannot beat in cost/performance any other CPU, because their price is an infinity, if you are a small business or an individual, because nobody will sell you any of them.There are a few server CPUs with ARM cores that are available at retail, e.g. from Broadcom or NXP, but those have worse performance per dollar than many AMD or Intel chips.
The only CPUs with ARM cores which have better performance per dollar than any AMD or Intel chip are those at the lowest endpoint of the performance range, when the entire server must cost under $200, or maybe at most up to $300, and where Chinese CPUs with ARM cores, e.g. Rockchip RK3588 or RK3568, have an unbeatable performance per dollar.
In a year or two, things might change a lot and there might appear good server options with Armv9 CPUs, but we are not there yet.
TomWomack - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
They can absolutely beat in cost/performance other CPUs in completely meaningful ways - run your job on c7g and c6i and compare whether you are getting more performance from $0.284/hr c7g.4xlarge or $0.2822/hr c6i.4xlarge.AdrianBc - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Using those instances is a good choice for people who do not know how to select and manage their own servers, but those who do know can achieve a much lower cost than when using a cloud.Regarding the cost of the cloud instances, we cannot know how well the prices offered to customers reflect the true cost of buying and operating such servers.
For a large company like Amazon, not sharing their profits with a middleman like AMD or Intel can be a sufficient financial advantage to make them use their own CPUs, even if they do not have any technical advantage.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
"where Chinese CPUs with ARM cores, e.g. Rockchip RK3588 or RK3568, have an unbeatable performance per dollar."You are massively overhyping their price/performance.
AdrianBc - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
RK3588, with quadruple Cortex-A76, has the same speed as the Intel 4-core Jasper Lake Pentium Silver or Celeron CPUs, but a complete computer with RK3588, at $150 - $300 is about $100 cheaper than a similarly-equipped computer with Jasper Lake.The cheapest computers with an AMD Zen or Intel Core CPUs are about 50% faster in single-thread than Cortex-A76, but their price is at least double.
Neither Intel Jasper Lake (Pentium N6005 / Celeron N5105) nor RK3588 can be recommended as personal computers, but for cheap servers, e.g. routers or NAS, or for home theaters, they are OK.
kgardas - Thursday, June 2, 2022 - link
Ampere is freely purchasable on common market. So if you like, you can use it. On the other hand I'm afraid their cache arch will not make them competitive for HPC job in comparison with neither intel nor amd.Silma - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
That's actually not true.Given the almost similar pricing between Graviton3 instances and AMD instances on AWS, the Graviton3 appeal will be of little interest to most organizations.
lemurbutton - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
x86 is not that interesting anymore. Anandtech needs to cover ARM server chips and ARM laptop/desktop chips more.nandnandnand - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
ARM is cringe. x86 will be with us for another 20 years.lemurbutton - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Yes. PowerPC chips are still here. Doesn't mean that it's relevant.x86 is out. Get with the times.
BushLin - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
LOL, get with the software market, flexible platform, support and boot options. Who wants to back to the bad old days of total vendor lockdown either?Otritus - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Can you please point out the retail devices with ARM laptop or desktop chips that deliver good performance and efficiency without an Apple logo? Maybe the DIY desktop ARM chips that deliver better performance per watt than Zen 3 and better performance per dollar than Alder Lake? ARM server is pretty interesting, but x86 is still competitive.The primary reason why x86 chips are bad is because AMD and Intel are fighting the GHz wars. Doubling clock speeds require a quadrupling in transistors, if there is a hardware frequency limit, or more than an octupling in power if there isn’t a hardware frequency limit. With ARM chips running at 3/5 the frequency of x86, it only makes sense that they are smaller and significantly more power efficient. People like to point out that the x86 ISA is bloated with legacy instruction sets, but the bloat is less than 5% on modern processors. If we take into account that x86 processes instructions poorly relative to ARM, you may hit a 10% efficiency, which while measurable, isn’t that significant. Also, if you care about ISA problems, then RISC-V should be used.
usiname - Monday, June 6, 2022 - link
You have not idea how the thigs work. Increasing of the frequency does not require increase in the transistor count. Exactly the opposite, you runing same transistor at higher frequency. M1 ultra has 114b transistors, and is slower than single 5950x(19b) + rtx 3090ti(28.3). Imagine to be slower while waste so much transistors. This is bexause the lower clock speedsDante Verizon - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
Go Home, you are drunk. The world is x86. period.Qasar - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
lemurbutton isnt drunk, hes just an apple fanboy who posts pretty much the same praise for apple every time and thinks m1 is the best and only cpu out thereBushLin - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
x86 is about as exciting as it has ever been if you look at the next two years of upcoming products. Until a common boot method and wide driver support exists for ARM it is the preserve of fixed products with limited choice... Like the 70s and early 80s but now we have better options, like the well established x86 market.Gondalf - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
This wrong, many Pro Tech sites dedicated to enterprise or other segments of server market, realized that in average actual Xeon is exactly on pair with Milan, doing a serious comparison with real world SW and real world workloads. So you are absolurely wrong. In fact actual Xeon is selling at record level, Milan nope.Qasar - Wednesday, June 1, 2022 - link
oh ? care to post a link that shows this ? or is just more of your anti amd posts ?