ARMs race: Ampere Altra takes on the AWS Graviton2

ARM has introduced the Neoverse N1 platform, the blueprint for creating power-efficient processors licensed to institutions that can customize the original design to meet their specific requirements. Ampere licensed the Neoverse N1 platform to create the Ampere Altra, a processor that allows companies that own and manage their own fleet of servers, like ourselves, to take advantage of the expanding ARM ecosystem. We have been working with Ampere to determine whether Altra is the right processor to power our first generation of ARM edge servers.

The AWS Graviton2 is the only other Neoverse N1-based processor publicly accessible, but only made available through Amazon's cloud product portfolio. We wanted to understand the differences between the two, so we compared Ampere's single-socket server, named Mt. Snow, equipped with the Ampere Altra Q80-30 against an EC2 instance of the AWS Graviton2.

Cloudflare compared these two ARM server platforms and benchmarked them, and they give a ton of detail about them, too. Give it a few more years, and ARM will be a decidedly normal sight within data centres all over the world.