80-Core Arm CPU To Bring Lower Power, Higher Density To A Rack Near You

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

ARM CPU vendor Ampere announced an 80-core CPU called the Altra on Tuesday. If the core count didn't clue you in already, the Altra is aimed at data-center computing rather than home or even typical business needs. The Altra's 80 cores do not offer hyperthreading, so 80 cores here means 80 threads as well.

Before we go into too much detail about the Altra-which is currently sampling but is not yet generally available and does not have any third-party benchmarks-it's instructive to take a look slightly backward to its little sibling, the 32-core eMAG 8180.

The Altra is not Ampere's first entry into data-center ARM computing. Its last processor, the eMAG 8180, is a 32-core part running at up to 3.3GHz turbo. The eMAG 8180 is available in packet.net's c2.large.arm package, in the form of Lenovo's ThinkSystem HR330A 1u single-socket systems.

Kinvolk, a Berlin-based Linux development company, did some pretty extensive benchmarking of a single-socket eMAG 8180 system-comparing it to a 24-core AMD Epyc 7401P (24c/48t) and a dual-socket Xeon Gold 5120 (28c/56t total).

[...] Like the eMAG, the Altra does not offer SMT (Simultaneous Multi Threading), so its 80 cores mean 80 threads. Unlike the eMAG, the Altra is designed for either single or dual-socket operation-so we can expect to see 160-core Altra-powered systems later in 2020. We know that there will be multiple SKUs, with a TDP range the data sheet specifies at 45W to 210W. But we don't know their individual details.

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