This insane 80-Core ARM CPU easily beat a 64 Core Threadripper

foreign you might recognize this location because we were already here about a year ago today we will visit hetzner again huge data center Provider from Germany but this time we will not visit the like server Farm or whatever we will take a look at a very specific arm-based server similar to our previous visit we are now in the development area of hetzer that's where they try out all their servers like investigate new platforms and stuff and that's why we are here to investigate the Empire Ultra right here in my hands I have a q8030 which is the CPU name 80 480 cores and 30 for the frequency of 3.0 gigahertz it also exists as q8033 but apparently the availability is quite difficult of the 33 version but I think also performance and especially performance per Watts this is a really interesting CPU the Ampere Ultra q8030 will sit in the LGA 4926 socket it's just that there is no special like naming scheme like no sp3 or anything but if you look at a socket it will definitely remind you of AMD epic or AMD thread repair that's also why they are using the same screwdriver with the same multi-force it's using 1.5 newton meters while the recommended force is or torque for the socket is 1.6 so it's very similar and the 1.6 is also with a certain tolerance I think it's about 10 which is why you can easily just use the same torque screwdriver for mounting the Altera Ultra the Ampere Alpha CPU in this socket looking at this you will also notice that apart from that the mounting mechanism is pretty similar to AMD the mounting for the cooler is entirely different like you will not be able to fit any kind of standard Intel or AMD cooler on here and even if you wanted to like if you look at the mounting Dimension it would not work and why that is the case I will show you once the CPU is sitting inside the socket I will try my best not to drop the CPU in the socket and break it like I did with the AMD CPU I mean that's a bit different from AMD thread repair because you don't have this sliding mechanism but apart from that definitely reminds me of it also you have five screws not only four and they also told me that I should definitely pay attention to the screw order you start with one two three four five because if you don't follow your order it's very likely that you will have some kind of memory detection issues now you can also see what I was talking about earlier that you might see some compatibility issues if you try to mount any kind of Intel or AMD cooler simply because even if you're mounting Dimension would fit it wouldn't fit on here because you can see the IHS is sitting lower than this loading mechanism which is quite interesting it's also something I think I've never seen on any other platform so far it certainly will make the processing or the manufacturing of the Heats better easier but yeah you always will have some kind of cooler limitations compatibility issues because if we switch over to the cooler they are using you can see they always have to have this elevated Center socket thing in the center whereas if you look at any other like Intel AMD epic whatever thing they can always be entirely flat so cooling manufacturing is definitely going to be more expensive the cooler we just investigated is a two unit cooler it is a bit beefier than the one which we will use on the system which is running in the background it also shows that these CPUs even though it's arm-based still has certain power draw it is listed with a TDP of 210 Watts at least for the three gigahertz version the 3.3 gigahertz version would be listed with 250 watt TDP but as we often discussed the TP doesn't necessarily mean that it's the peak power consumption because when we run geekbench later we will also see that the power draw can be a bit higher than that one thing that sets the emperor Ultra apart from a typical like Intel or AMD system is the fact that it's based on arm it's an arm V8 CPU and arm is something if you want to say it easy it's a different instruction set so for example the Intel and AMD CPUs they are all based on x86 this is based from like the early Intel days when they had like the ad 186 286 386 at a certain time they started to just get rid of the 80 in front of it and just added x86 that's why it's called that way but then you also have for example IBM power that's also something we already checked in previous videos and then you also have our arm is something that is created by a company which is not making chips themselves but they are making the instruction set and the Ampere Ultra is an arm-based CPU which is also why we are limited in the programs we can use like everything you see on let's say info when you when you run your typical windows with steam and you want to run like 3D Market cinebench all of these programs are x86 based which means that we cannot simply run this on this server but luckily geekbench 5 because it's a cross platform Benchmark we can also Run geekbench 5 on here you might notice for example from mobile devices they are like tablets and handheld devices mobile phones which are based on arm and then you can also compare your performance with geekbench 5 which is why we are going to do that on here I can and I can promise you that the performance is absolutely impressive especially if you compare this let's say with an AMD epic or threat repair you also have for example a 128 thread CPUs but for this let's say if you would use the 128 core CPU it's using native cores like one core is one thread it doesn't use smt which is why it has a massive multi-threading performance and here we have the running server as I said before it's using the same CPU so the q8030 quickly overview over the head Center cooling solution they always make their custom cooling brackets for efficient cooling of let's say memory dimms and also the CPU we can quickly take a look at the CPU cooling solution so unplug the fan and this like fan tunnel I would call it for channeling the air and here we can see that the cooling solution the heatsink is a bit different from the one we just saw earlier it's a bit more compact has a different heat pipe orientation the heat pipes are vertical is going upright it's a bit more compact I said before right now this is no problem to run it without a fan because as you can see we already hooked up an Elmore PMD which heads are also boss it's pretty awesome and the CPU idle power draw like that's just CPU nothing else it's between let's say 30 and 40 watt so that's totally fine running the heatsink for a few seconds without the fan no problem at all memory wise or dimwise we are running octa-core configuration so eight dims four on each side technically the Ampere Ultra supports up to 16 dims and four terabyte Max Capacity when it comes to storage hedner is working with oculink even though that there are m.2 drives or m.2 slots available like underneath the fan it's a bit difficult to see but underneath here would be m.2 slots at least for the main board but they decided to go with these oculine cards and technically they can hook up up to four devices per slot which makes sense it's for PC express lanes per cable and then right here we have these 2.5 inch drives the reason why hatzner is testing the CPU here is obvious because they want to have this also listed as dedicated root server very similar to what you saw in some of our advertising spots when we were advertising ax like 41 dedicated route servers they will have this configuration also available as a dedicated boot server and then when it comes to storage you can select from zero well base wouldn't make much sense but up to 8 nbme ssds each of them 3.84 terabyte size as you can see we are now running Linux and we will now run keypad 5 but due to the fact that on Linux you have to run it with the command so we don't have the nice graphical interface but that's no problem at all on the right side you can see the total system power consumption that's an external tool made by hetzner so they have this monitoring available right here so that's not like member monitorium or anything like that total system power consumption so everything included like PSU switching losses vrm switching losses dram and everything in case you're wondering the CPU is an SOC that's why it's reading SOC temperature but let's just run the Benchmark and see what kind of performance we can get first of all we are running the single core bench as you can see on the left that's also why the power draw the total system power door did not really change that much it went from like 80 to 90 to like 95 to 100 so it's not a big change only loading One Core also no big change in temperature but that will drastically change once we run multi-core now that we are running the multi-core you can see it changed a lot it just went down because it's running a different subtest but here you can see for example it went to 220 Watts now it's here 270 but that just purely depends on the subtests it's running we saw Peak power consumption right here of about 310 watt quite interesting is that the temperature is still quite low even though we're running height low like 250 watt right now it's only like 65 degrees Celsius and here we have the final result single core score is 882 and multi-core is 44 425 and for your reference because not everybody might run geekbench 5 every single day the current record that is set on HW bot is with threadripper 3990x overclocked as well and it scores about 34 000 points so this system has a higher score by about 10 000 points and now we also have to go back to the point of system power consumption what you saw on the right was the total system power consumption as I said before about 310 Watt peak but that's total like switching losses of PSU switching losses of the brm memory and everything and we also checked in between with the Elmore PMD and the power draw there just CPU pure CPU power draw was about 170 180 Watt now if you look again at performance and power consumption the efficiency is insane it's like twice it's like double compared to a current flat dripper or epic CPU because as well the 3990x is a 64 128 thread CPU pretty impressive this is kind of the end of the video but also not because headset allowed us to take this CPU with us home so we can delete this CPU back at home now time to delete the CPU right now we have no idea if the CPU is soldered or if it's using conventional thermal paste which means we will first try to use a razor blade cut around the IHS see if we can get it loose or not and then we will figure it out yeah well that just didn't work out just with the razor blade not sure how the CPU is internally built it could be similar to a thread repair it's also tsmc seven nanometer but yeah just simple cutting around the edge didn't work now you can see we're back at our Workshop here at thermal Grizzly and whenever we're doing those videos I'm finding out that we lack equipment this time I figured out that we're lacking the equipment for a device because you typically have these things I'm not sure how they are called but these are made of plastic so they will not be rigid enough for the lidding and typically you also have them made out of like aluminum for example I don't have them here but I ordered them so I will have them next time that's why I have to use those like precisely grind it steel plates which you're not supposed to use it for back then when I did my apprenticeship they would have killed me for doing that but luckily I'm My Own Boss so nobody can complain foreign it's thermal paste it's not soldered and actually it was already enough cutting around the edge we just probably would have used a bit more Force not bad at all the deleting was much easier than I expected because the CPU is not soldered you can see still the thermal paste residues on IHS while I already cleaned everything off the package of the CPU it's quite impressive especially when you measure the die sizes it's about 22.5 times 25.5 millimeter in length and width which then equals about 574 Square millimeters of die size compared to a bit older 7980xe this had about like 480 Square millimeters the width is the same with 22.5 but it's a bit longer it's about four millimeters longer it's still somewhat comparable in die sizes which is why I took this CPU for comparison reason but if you check the amount of pads which are used like connectivity wise the Ampere CPU has a ton more that's also why the PCB or the package itself is quite a lot larger that's mainly because this CPU has this huge amount of PCI Express Lanes 128 for connectivity which is required for having a good connectivity for a huge amount of devices and also for the Dual socket compatibility yeah so much about dye sizes for CPU but I find it very impressive like how tiny on what kind of surface or area you can pack 80 cores this was our quick Journey regarding an arm CPU it was also the first time that I ever used one or tested one it was quite interesting maybe also quite interesting for you maybe also the first time that you saw some kind of footage regarding arm CPUs on servers by the time this video will be online there will also be the dedicated root server available by hetzner which will feature this at core arm CPU if that's something for you definitely make sure to check out the link in the description below below and thank you very much to hatzner for the possibility and also the access to the CPU I mean just being able to test this is one thing and then also to get uh I mean in the end this is a 4000 Euro CPU right and to get one of these with us home and be able to delete it just to check what's inside it's very impressive so thank you very much for the cooperation and the possibility for testing and also getting the CPU it's been like two months that we shot the video and these servers are finally available so we can also finally publish the video quick update at the end right here about the service situation on the hetzner website so you can find these under RX branding both servers come with the same q8030 CPU that we saw in the video but the rx170 will cost 169 euro per month and will have 128 gigabyte of ECC memory and two 960 gigabyte ssds the bigger RX 220 will have twice the amount of memory and dual 3.84 terabyte ssds and costs about 219 euro per month so I hope you enjoyed this video and the quick journey into the arm sector thanks for watching and see you next time foreign

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 470,786

Keywords:

Id: m6-juFXR9c0

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/loser7500000]

Title refers to Q80-30 beating a 3990X in geekbench, which seems odd given their target markets (their launch MSRPs are both funnily $4K though)

Obligatory link to Anandtech's release coverage, as well as a more up to date review for the 128 core Altra max featuring Milan/Zen 3 and Ice Lake. They're moving more towards cloud than HPC from what I've heard, and all 3 here are meant to be shipping new gen's soon. Also worth mentioning Graviton.

[u/Frothar]

for an up to date comparison the 5995WX scores 45000 in Geekbench multithreaded so just beats out this ARM chip. Not taking anything away from the ARM chip of course since that is AMDs best of the best and its very close

[u/zeroping]

I am running an Ampere-based Gigabyte server as a home server, and am happy to answer any questions. (yes, it's total overkill.) It even appears to be the same motherboard as in the video.

Most surprising thing to me: it just works. Wrote the Debian ARM installer to a USB key, and UEFI booted and installed just fine.

Most useful feature: an insane number of PCIe lanes. Great for doing something with old NVMe drives. This would be true of an equivalent Threadripper too though.

Most surprising problem: No hardware h.264 decoding. Even a Raspberry Pi has that! I'm currently running Frigate for video surveillance, and so I have several ffmpeg instances decoding video via the CPU so that it can do object detection in the video.

[u/niew]

Glad to see ARM server CPUs in the wild. Next few years will see competition between different ARM vendors.

We will definitely see more details about Nvidia Grace in September GTC. Though Nvidia will focus more on high end solutions with soldered high bandwidth LPDDR5x

[u/jesta030]

Is there ARM stuff for the average homelabber? As in more powerful than RPi but a bit less costly than this server grade equipment?

[u/DerRationalist]

Considering that even these beasts only use 128 bit Neon registers, SVE can be considered an absolute flop?

[u/yycTechGuy]

In his other video, the stock unit scored 882/44,425, which is about twice the MC speed of my EPYC 7601 (32cores)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-juFXR9c0&t=630s

I wish these processors had more memory bandwidth. CFD is memory bandwidth constrained, not CPU constrained.

[u/Dan-in-Va]

Ok, nobody has said it so far that I can see.

The cat! LOL

[u/[deleted]]

I'm all aboard the ARM future but I'm curious to see how held back it will be due to the amount of software that runs on x86. Of course we can always just emulate x86 on ARM but that will never be 100% efficient so it will require ARM processors to be more powerful than their x86 counterparts by a significant margin.

I could be wrong though as Apple's Rosetta is already achieving 78%-79% efficiency so maybe in 5 to 10 years we'll see around 90% efficiency for x86 emulation which would only require ARM chips to make up a 10% performance loss.

It would be especially exciting to see more ARM based GPUs come to market with similar performance to Nvidia and AMD with all the power efficiency of ARM but I'm doubtful we're close to that at this point.