Avantek's Arm Workstation: Ampere eMAG 8180 32-core Arm64 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on May 22, 2020 8:00 AM ESTSPEC2017: Weak ST Performance
Single-threaded performance of the system is going to be interesting, but given the age of the CPUs we shouldn’t be expecting any miracles.
As comparison points, I’m adding the new Neoverse-N1 based Graviton2 results, which should server as an indicator what a contemporary Arm core should be able to achieve, as well as Intel’s i7-10700K (Equivalent to an 9900K) – a common mainstream consumer-grade CPU that should represent your higher-end x86 desktop machine.
Things aren’t looking too well for the Skylark cores, as performance isn’t really up to par with more recent generation hardware. There’s no specific workload in which the eMAG does badly in, but we do see that small memory footprint workloads such as 548.exchange2 aren’t faring all that badly – pointing out that for the other workloads the system must be cache and memory bottlenecked.
In the floating point suite, things are again not too great and performance further craters in some tests.
Overall, the eMAG 8180 is extremely disappointing in its single-threaded performance. It’s actually quite intriguing to see the results. Even though the Skylark cores are operating at 3.3GHz, the end performance isn’t any better than a 2.1GHz Cortex-A72 core such as found in the first-generation Graviton chip. That’s quite the massive IPC disadvantage even between those two older CPU microarchitectures, and reminds us of the reason AppliedMicro hadn’t really seen much success with its design.
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lmcd - Friday, May 22, 2020 - link
You can't just reference the RPi 3 and 4 interchangeably. RPi 4 ranges from 2x to 10x faster than the RPi 3 depending on workload. Most SBCs surpassed the RPi 3 merely by choosing an SoC without its terrible I/O constraints. A few have 2xA72. The RPi 4 has 4xA72 at a better process node -> better clockspeed for the same thermal constraints, and no FSB limitations. Its CPU performance is ahead of all but the top-end hardware development kit boards.lmcd - Friday, May 22, 2020 - link
Apparently I'm a moron that didn't see the ODROID-N2 release. That CPU is noticeably better.SarahKerrigan - Friday, May 22, 2020 - link
It would likely win by a small to moderate amount against the Pi4 on ST, and obviously by a factor of several times on MT.Altra will increase those numbers considerably, since it should be doing 2-3x the ST eMag and a much larger factor for MT due to the core count increase.
Dodozoid - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - link
Would have been interesting if AMDs planned K12 worked out. Any idea if any part of that architecture is still alive?AnarchoPrimitiv - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
There's a decent amount of spelling errors and wrong word errors in this article, for example:"... having an Arm system like this is the fact that it enables YOUR (I think you mean "you") native software development, without having to worry about cross-compiling code and all of the kerfuffle that that ENTRAILS (I think you mean "entails")"
There's a few of those on every page, did anyone even proof read this once before publishing?
LordConrad - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
"...without having to worry about cross-compiling code and all of the kerfuffle that that entrails."Wow, who did you have to disembowel to get the cross-compiling done?
abufrejoval - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
He quite exaggerated the effort, because it makes little difference if you compile GCC for the host architecture or a different one: Just a matter of configuration and that's it.You have to understand that pretty much every compiler has to compile itsself, because nobody wants to code it in machine binary or assembly. The code for all supported target architectures comes with the compiler source tree and you just need to pick the proper parts to use.
It's just a tad more involved than simply running cc off the shelf.
Fataliity - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
"You must first compile the compiler, to then compile your code"
Sounds pretty crazy. Isn't the compilers also written in c++, which are compiling c++?
My brain hurts.
GreenReaper - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
It involves a frequently non-trivial, multi-step process called bootstrapping:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compi...
abufrejoval - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
Well, recursion really grows on you after a bit of use :-)While I am pretty sure gcc is written in C++ these days, obviously the first C++ compiler still had to be written in C, because otherwise there was nothing to compile it with. Only after the C++ compiler had been compiled and was ready to run, the compiler could be refactored in C++, which I am pretty sure was done rather gradually, perhaps never fully.
These days I doubt that the GNU Fortran, Objective-C, Go or plain old C-compiler are written in anything but C++, because there would be no benefit in doing so. But of course, it could be done (I wouldn't want to write a compiler in Fortran, but I guess some of the early ones were, perhaps with lots of assembly sprinkled in).
The GNU bootstrapping was done a long time ago, perhaps with a K&R compiler and you don't typically have to go through the full process described in the article GreenReaper linked to. Pretty sure LLVM was bootstrapped in GCC and now you could do the same the other way around, if you didn't know what else to do with your day.
I hear the Rust guys want to do a full bootstrap now, but so far their compiler was probably just done in C++. Not that they really have to, probably just because "eat your own dogfood" gets on their nerves.
The process Andrei had to use is pretty much whatever the guy who put 'cc/c++' on the shelf of your Unix/Linux had to do, except that Andrei had to explicitly configure an ARM64 v8 target during the compile, while by default the Makefile or script will pick the host architecture.
Really a pretty minor effort, trivial if you are used to build Unix/Linux applications or even a kernel or distribution from source.
And if you are developing for Android, that's what's happening all the time under the hood, there: So far nobody will want to build Android on an Android device, because it's rather slow already, even on a big server with dozens of cores.