1st ARMv8 SoC server w/48 cores
 

Intel has a new competitor in the low-end server segment with the first ARM based machine to actually make it to market: [URL="http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores"]http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores[/URL]

You can tell from the specs that they made it a simple chip compared to Xeons, probably in order to cut costs and save development time. But hey, it has 48 cores! The system tested is a 1U server with a Gigabyte motherboard.

The benchmarks are interesting but inconclusive.

The whole point here is if this thing sells decently at all and is more than a one shot deal, the developer will be encouraged to produce a fuller line of systems, some of which could be quite accessable and interesting for our line of work.

But of course, the issue, as always with these multi core systems, is memory starvation due to insufficient bandwidth, so take a '48 cores' advantage with a grain of salt.

Also, don't forget, Intel is coming out with AVX-512 Xeons early 2017!

[QUOTE=tServo;436418]Intel has a new competitor in the low-end server segment with the first ARM based machine to actually make it to market: [URL]http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores[/URL]

You can tell from the specs that they made it a simple chip compared to Xeons, probably in order to cut costs and save development time. But hey, it has 48 cores! The system tested is a 1U server with a Gigabyte motherboard.

The benchmarks are interesting but inconclusive.

The whole point here is if this thing sells decently at all and is more than a one shot deal, the developer will be encouraged to produce a fuller line of systems, some of which could be quite accessable and interesting for our line of work.

But of course, the issue, as always with these multi core systems, is memory starvation due to insufficient bandwidth, so take a '48 cores' advantage with a grain of salt.

Also, don't forget, Intel is coming out with AVX-512 Xeons early 2017![/QUOTE]

This looks very like a first attempt at that many cores. There are improvements to be made such as moving from 28nm to 16nm.
As it stands AVX512 won't help Prime95 due to memory bandwidth limitations. What is more important currently is performance/watt. In general arm does well on this. If they produce a 16nm version of this they will either be able to reduce power usage or improve performance which will make it quite nice.

It's known that MySQL doesn't scale well beyond 32 cores, so don't fault the ThunderX there.

The L1 cache stalls on misses is really bad though.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;436433]It's known that MySQL doesn't scale well beyond 32 cores, so don't fault the ThunderX there.

The L1 cache stalls on misses is really bad though.[/QUOTE]

The caches in general don't look good. Once you get out of the L1 cache the latency is terrible. These are the sort of things I would expect them to fix in the next generation.