SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for takyon
Ampere is launching two versions of its first ARM-based 64-bit server processor today in a challenge to Intel's dominance of data center chips.
Intel dominates about 99 percent of the server chip market with its x86-based processors, but Ampere is targeting power-efficient, high-performance, and high-memory capacity features with its Ampere eMAG processors for data centers.
Renee James, former president of Intel and CEO of Ampere, said in an interview with VentureBeat that customers can now order the chip from the company's website. The chips are aimed at hyperscale cloud and edge computing, using the ARMv8-A cores. The chips target big data and in-memory databases.
[...] Based on the SPECint benchmark performance, Ampere's eMAG processor can deliver about twice the performance of the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 processor at about the same price, the company said. The eMAG with 32 cores and 3.3 Ghz in performance will sell for $850, and with 16 cores at 3.3 GHz will sell for $550.
[...] Ampere designed its cores, which feature eight DDR4-2667 memory controllers, 42 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for high bandwidth I/O, 125W TDP for maximum power efficiency, and a 16-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process at contract manufacturer TSMC.
Previously: Former Intel President Launches New Chip Company With Backing From Carlyle Group
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday September 21 2018, @05:56AM (5 children)
Something like video processing.
Oh, sorry that's actually unimaginable, because no one is willing to go to the trouble to learn how to write concurrent code.
There are other ways than multithreading, for example Apple's Open Source Grand Central Dispatch [apple.com]. I expect it has the Apple Public Source License version 2.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @06:24AM
The man's - Yuipson's - eyes opened wide in shock. That was too fast. Sure, he knew how fragile these were, but still, that was much too fast. Frustrated, Yuipson grabbed the next one and began angrily pumping. This process of moving from one to the next was known as 'The Shuffling'. And shuffle he did.
The little girl's head slammed against the wall as Yuipson aggressively violated her from behind. What's more, the large man was slamming her back with one of his fists. It really couldn't be helped: the other little girl had died all too quickly from a mere slashed throat, angering the man profusely. From there, it didn't take long for the man's anger to reach catastrophic levels; once that happened, it certainly did not take long for the brutalized little girl to slump to the ground lifelessly.
"Damnit!" Yuipson screeched. They just didn't make these things like they used to! So, he shuffled to the next one. Then, the next one. And then the next one. And then the next one. The Shuffling continued until all that remained in the room were Yuipson and a pile of lifeless puppets that just so happened to resemble children. Righteous fury indeed.
At this scene, Yuipson boldly declared, "The Shuffling will continue!" Yes, although his supply had run out, he need only acquire more...
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday September 21 2018, @01:05PM
The only* desktop application I recall using a high percentage of all my cores/threads is handbrake, working through a queue. Even so, it's a great example of desktop software that does indeed chew up all cores encoding video.
Anything else insanely compute-intensive that uses many cores/threads seems to be of the start-from-a-prompt variety, such as compiling something nontrivial with the -j switch requesting the use of a particular number of threads.
Or, the classic way, starting heavy single-threaded things from a prompt, and juggling them for max CPU utilization.
Something tells me, though, that if their target is "hyperscale cloud** and edge computing" then the individual processes that combine to tax the CPU are going to be VMs, which are hardly desktop applications.
I sometimes wonder what will become mature first, multithreaded code practices, or quantum computing algorithms.
If clustering ever gets solved, by the way, then that will probably solve the multithreading thing as well because you could cluster more processes to the extra threads similar to clustering processes on different machines.
-----
* Other than mining. Any *-coin software that features CPU mining can pretty much melt a CPU to glass and slag by design.
** There is no "cloud" [fsfe.org]--just other people's computers. Even if there are people who deny that [zdnet.com] because it offends their worldview.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday September 21 2018, @02:43PM
I've seen that future coming for over ten years and have been preparing for it. I've even advocated for that approach here on SN.
I happen to (mostly) work in Java. The first significant current code I dabbled with was in Clojure (on the JVM). Clojure has a great concurrency story.
Next I used some of the new Java frameworks which make it easy to use worker pools and fork/join. For certain operations I can see substantial improvements in performance as well as getting all the cores to light up. Just as with anything that needs to perform well, you allocate all your structures up front, then run your performance critical code which (ideally) should not generate any garbage. This same lesson would apply to other GC languages.
Your JVM code hits three performance stages as it "warms up":
1. interpreted bytecode until the dynamic profiler notices it is using all the CPU
2. compiled to native by the C1 compiler (fast compiler generates simiple native code)
3. the previous step, queued your code to get shortly recompiled by the C2 compiler (slow compiler generates highly optimized native code)
The native code from C2 is targeted at your specific hardware, eg, whatever microprocessor you have, it's instruction set extensions, etc. Things an ahead-of-time compiler cannot do and be cross-platform to all processors.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 21 2018, @04:49PM (1 child)
Gentoo. Nuff said.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @06:49PM
Exherbo!