Back in the first half of 2020, Ampere introduced its new product - the Altra ARM chip. A distinctive feature of the novelty, which was discussed by many media outlets, was the presence of up to 80 cores. And now, finally, the first tests of this "monster" appeared on the network.
We are talking about two-socket platforms Mount Jade, which Ampere sent to foreign journalists, reports ServerNews. The new product was compared with a 64-core AMD EPYC 7742 at a price of $ 6,950 and a 28-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 for $ 10,009. As a result of a head-on collision with competitors, it became clear that interprocessor communication is the weak link of Altra - for the same AMD, the Infinity Fabric width is twice as wide.
At the same time, Altra Q80-33 proved to be the clear leader in the same memory bandwidth tests. The chip also performed well in the SPECint2017 and SPECfp2017 single-threaded tests, where the Amper solution proved to be at least no worse than the Xeon Platinum 8280, and in some cases it outperformed AMD EPYC 7742.
In general, the overall test results showed the great potential of the new platform. And given that the Ampere Altra is noticeably cheaper than its competitors ($ 4,050 versus $ 6,950 and 10,009), the chip will clearly find its own buyer.
