Arm Announces Neoverse V1, N2 Platforms and CPUs, CMN-700 Mesh

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16640/arm-announces-neoverse-v1-n2-platforms-cpus-cmn700-mesh

by timthorn • 5 years ago

216 92 5 years ago

anandtech.com

akmittal2• 5 years ago

Apple's M1 has made ARM mainstream for laptops, Lets see which company does same for server space.

Hopefully ARM on cloud will result in cheaper prices.

lifty2• 5 years ago

Apple's M1 will make ARM mainstream on the server side.

leesalminen2• 5 years ago

Personally, I don’t see many server admins choosing to pay the Apple Tax to get M1 into their data center. I don’t see how the watt/performance ratio could pay off that kind of tax.

Symmetry2• 5 years ago

Apple hasn't seemed interested historically. And the Nuvia folks left Apple to found their company explicitly because they thought an M1 style CPU core would do well in servers but Apple wasn't interested in doing that.

jamesfmilne• 5 years ago

Apple have been hiring for Kubernetes and related roles. This may well be for their own devops for Apple services.

However I'd be amazed if they don't release some kind of managed service for running Swift code in the cloud. Caveat emptor, though.

ageyfman• 5 years ago

this is inevitable.

k__3• 5 years ago

My operating systems teacher 2001 was a total RISC fan and always said it would eventually overtake CISC.

I guess, he didn't expect this to take well after his retirement.

ericbarrett• 5 years ago

I nominate Amazon for this award. As mentioned in another comment here, ~50% of newly allocated EC2 instances are ARM.

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

Funnily coincident timing: current post #2 (GCC 11.1 released) adds support for the CPUs mentioned here (currently post #4):

  AArch64 & arm

    A number of new CPUs are supported through arguments to the -mcpu and -mtune options in both the arm and aarch64 backends (GCC identifiers in parentheses):
        Arm Cortex-A78 (cortex-a78).
        Arm Cortex-A78AE (cortex-a78ae).
        Arm Cortex-A78C (cortex-a78c).
        Arm Cortex-X1 (cortex-x1).
        Arm Neoverse V1 (neoverse-v1).
        Arm Neoverse N2 (neoverse-n2).

Good to see work going into this at the proper times. (Not that that was much of a problem for CPU cores in recent times. Still not a matter of course though.)

floatboth5• 5 years ago

These tunings will only be used if you compile stuff yourself with -march=native (or specifying one particular model). Most software out there would be compiled with generic non-tuned optimizations. The tuning is rarely a huge deal though.

sitkack2• 5 years ago

That is not entirely true. Binaries in the packaging systems might not be compiled for the most recent atomic instructions which can really affect performance.

https://blog.dbi-services.com/aws-postgresql-on-graviton2-aa...

https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/488

We are about 9-14 months away from the right pieces making their way through the software ecosystems where this will be almost a non-issue.

Exciting times for everyone!

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

True, but it's still relevant for 3 things:

- when you have a particularly CPU-intensive application, you'd hopefully compile it to target your system

- the cloud providers can just do a custom Debian/Ubuntu/... build for their zillions of identical systems

- the library loading mechanism on Linux is slowly getting support for having multiple compile variants of a library packaged into different subdirectories of /lib (e.g. "/usr/lib64/tls/haswell/x86_64")

Also I was mostly trying to point out as a positive how well the interaction is working there between ARM and the GCC project. I wish it were like this for other types of silicon.

(CPU vendors all seem to be getting this right, and GPUs are slowly getting there, but much other silicon is horrible… e.g. wifi chips)

simondotau4• 5 years ago

You can tell it's a modern CPU because its name matches the [A-Z][0-9] pattern.

simondotau4• 5 years ago

That was a joke by the way. Sorry that I'm the only one who thought it was funny.

ykl• 5 years ago

I thought it was funny!

saagarjha• 5 years ago

As opposed to those old [a-z][0-9] CPUs that Intel puts out ;)

truth_seeker• 5 years ago

Hah. I like it when I can enjoy my hammock instead of fine tuning my code to weird limits for performance.

DDR5,PCIE 5.0, SVE speedup and 40% IPC improvement put a big smile on my face.

klelatti6• 5 years ago

AWS Graviton2-based EC2 Instances make up 14% of the installed base within AWS
49% of AWS EC2 instance additions in 2020 are based on Graviton2

Surprised at this level of Graviton2 adoption in AWS at this stage. Any clues as to who is using these instances?

Edit: Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

AWS itself is probably the main user I would guess. So you use them indirectly through AWS' vendor lock APIs.

TheGuyWhoCodes• 5 years ago

RDS support Graviton2 as the instance type, maybe people with supported versions just migrated.

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

"instance additions" also doesn't take instance size/performance into account. If ARM-based instances are overall smaller, that'd allow more of them, distorting the numbers...

Percentage of compute power would be cool to know here.

somethingwitty1• 5 years ago

There have been a bunch of higher-profile, "we moved to Graviton2 and cut costs". Twitter, for example, migrated: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/twitter-selects-aws-and...

neuronexmachina• 5 years ago

Also Netflix, although I don't think they've said what portion of their instances they've migrated: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/customers/

KuiN• 5 years ago

They're the cheapest EC2 instance type, so they're very attractive to small scale deployments like side projects, personal sites etc. (basically anything that can run on one or two small nodes) where budget is a major concern. The t4g.micro is in the free tier as well, so that'll help.

I host a few very low traffic sites & I'm in the process of switching from a basic DO Droplet to a pair of low-end Gravitons. Will save me money and give better peak performance for my workloads.

klelatti6• 5 years ago

Maybe, but it would take a _lot_ of people moving small deployments (where by definition the savings would be small especially relative to the fixed costs of getting to work on Arm) in a relatively short space of time to have this impact - so I'm sceptical (and if it is then it must be very easy to move to Arm - which I'm also sceptical of).

More likely some very big customers (peer comment mentions Twitter) moving to Graviton2 for cost savings.

ac29• 5 years ago

switching from a basic DO Droplet to a pair of low-end Gravitons. Will save me money and give better peak performance for my workloads.

I'm having trouble figuring this out - a t4g.micro is $6/month, before any storage or data transfer costs. The roughly equivalent DO offering is $5/month, inclusive of 25GB SSD and 1TB transfer. Even with a reserve instance discount and significantly less than 1TB outbound transfer, DO seems likely to be cheaper.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.

It was both AMD and ARM.

There are many work loads that G2 offer immediate cost / performance advantage. AWS charges per vCPU, which is one thread on Intel/AMD and one Core on ARM. So you get ~30% performance improvement along with a ~30% lower cost for using ARM Graviton Series. Most of them have reported a total of 50% reduction in cost. For those that have hundreds if not thousands of EC2 running which fits that workload advantage, this is too much saving to pass on.

There are many SaaS running on EC2 that has mentioned their success on twitter and various other places.

Worth pointing out, this is with Amazon installing as many as they get from TSMC.

A few months ago on HN I wrote [1] about how half of the Intel DC market will be gone in a few years time.

Edit: Another point worth mentioning, this is as much of a threat to Medium and Smaller Size Cloud like Linode and DO where they dont have access to ARM (Yet). And even when they get it Amazon have the cost advantage of building their own instead of buying from a company ( Ampere ).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856

qzw• 5 years ago

Linode and DO could always offer a physical x86 core instead of a virtual SMT core. It would cut into margins somewhat, but maybe Intel and AMD would be more willing to discount when they have to play defense. I think one problem for the x86 guys is that because the demand for chips far exceeds supply, they’re still doing “fine” or even “well” right now. So the threat from ARM may still be perceived on mostly an intellectual level instead of provoking the necessary visceral survival response.

baybal23• 5 years ago

I believe Intel couldn't have imagined with what ease their biggest customers can turn into their biggest competitors overnight.

Even a decade ago that would've been unthinkable, but today, making a cookiecutter SoC is relatively easy because nearly everything can be taken off the shelf.

Production costs though.... sub-10nm mask set costs completely rule out anything resembling a startup competing in this area.

I think 65nm was the last golden opportunity to jump on the departing train. It was still posible to ship a cookie cutter chip under $1m, now... no way.

Now, Semi industry is basically Airbus vs. Boeing.

klelatti6• 5 years ago

Agreed .. except weren't Ampere (2017) and Nuvia (2019) startups?

jleahy• 5 years ago

Do you actually know how much a sub-10nm mask set costs? There’s a lot of speculation from people who don’t have access to those numbers. Those who do are bound by NDAs.

sitkack2• 5 years ago

Startups can absolutely compete here. There is sufficient capital to fund chip design (integration) and it is relatively low risk. We are going to see a huge number of Arm and RISC-V solutions on the market 14 months from now.

aliswe• 5 years ago

Cookie cutter?

vosper• 5 years ago

The company I work for has migrated hundreds of heavily-utilised Elasticsearch and Storm nodes to Graviton. No performance issues, pure cost saving. We’re working on the rest of our systems now. We’re going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years.

phamilton• 5 years ago

We haven't migrated yet but we expect to do some benchmarking this quarter for Aurora.

For EC2 we run on spot and spot c5.metal are cheaper per vcpu than c6g.metal, so we haven't prio'd benchmarking our compute loads.

carlosf• 5 years ago

AWS's own offerings such as RDS and internal control plane stuff are very likely using ARM behind the sheets.

I have evaluated going ARM, but I ended up deciding the savings were not worth it.

Not only you need to mantain 2 archs simultaneously for some time, but porting some stuff to ARM, (e.g. Python) can be a pain in the ass.

Finally, my devs work in AMD64 and that would be another source for "why does this work in dev but not prod".

loudmax• 5 years ago

Finally, my devs work in AMD64 and that would be another source for "why does this work in dev but not prod".

I can see a use case for building a CI/CD pipeline on Raspberry Pi's.

bushbaba• 5 years ago

Just wait for the m1 MacBook to become common place. Then it’ll be my devs use ARM.

StreamBright• 5 years ago

I know many users. Basically any non-x86 workload that cost sensitive can benefit from moving to arm instances. Database instances are good candidates, big data workloads as well.

sleepy_keita• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if AWS is using Graviton2 pretty heavily for internal processes as well, stuff like control planes for the major services like S3, SQS, SNS, etc...

mwcampbell• 5 years ago

I hope that ARM servers with reasonable specs won't be exclusive to AWS and the other hyperscalers. For example, it would be nice if OVH would offer ARM-based dedicated servers.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

this is good. if ARM take off for consumers and business. i'm hoping RISC-V will get some traction. there are alternative to Intel's x86.

potlee• 5 years ago

I wonder why they didn't use AWS wide numbers rather then just EC2. I would have thought EC2 would lag in the transition while AWS services would make the switch quickly

dogma1138• 5 years ago

Because EC2 represents a more realistic market adoption, it’s more important to know if you can run the software of your choice on ARM than can Amazon develop a service on an ARM stack.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Tl;dr

V1 = Slightly tweaked ARM Cortex X1 with SVE ( Used on Snapdragon 888 ) on 7nm aiming at ~4W per Core.

N2 = New Cortex with AMRv9, ~40% IPC improvement over N1 or 10% lower than V1, SVE2, 5nm aiming at ~2W per Core. With Similar die size to N1. ( I fully expect Amazon to go 128 Core with their N2 Graviton )

So in case anyone is wondering, no, it is not Apple M1 level. Not anywhere close.

CMN-700 = More Cores and support of Memory partitioning, important for VMs.

paulpan• 5 years ago

Nice TLDR!

It's apples and oranges comparison to Apple M1 chips (server vs. consumer) but does hint at what's possible with the next generation ARM Cortex "X2" cores, that could appear in next year's flagship smartphones and laptops. A 30-40% IPC jump, partly due to moving to 5nm fabrication process, is huge.

Given the right implementation, namely squeezing more big cores than the current 1-3-4 configuration, it could close the gap considerably with Apple.

plekter2• 5 years ago

Process node changes generally doesn't do anything for IPC - those are generally rather due to microarchitecture improvements, so I doubt the move to 5nm has anything to do with the IPC gain..?

andrewcchen• 5 years ago

The cores don't serve the same purpose as the M1 cores. M1 is optimized for single thread at the cost of die size (and a bit of power). I don't have exact numbers, but say the apple M1 core takes 1.5x the die area of N2, the you'd get better performance by putting in 1.5x the number of N2 cores.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Yes. M1 / A14 is also a 5W+ Core. So a different set of trade off. I mentioned the M1 because it is the question that always comes up and people keep banging on about it. I wish most tech site would simply point this out since they have the reach. But it is obvious neither Apple nor ARM have the interest for their pieces to be named and compared in this way. And I guess tech site wont do this to harm any relationship.

up6w6• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if these processors make mobile development easier ? I mean, its the same architecture now, right ?

The only thing I could find is https://www.genymotion.com/blog/just-launched-arm-native-and...

jayd16• 5 years ago

Not really. Maybe the emulators are faster but the main languages are managed anyway.

danudey• 5 years ago

Plus for iOS, even the idevice simulator just builds for whatever platform you're testing on.

Arm Announces Neoverse V1, N2 Platforms and CPUs, CMN-700 Mesh

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