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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: 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.
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* 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.