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back to article Packet's 'big boy' servers given a shot in the Arm with 32-core, 3.3GHz Ampere CPUs

Cloud provider Packet has upgraded its most powerful Arm-based servers with 32-core CPUs from Ampere – a plucky startup led by former Intel president Renée James. The first generation of Ampere's eMAG chips was launched in September 2018, with silicon clocked at 3.3GHz. To create its beefiest ever Arm-based machines, Packet …

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  1. Tom 7

    Could do with that in a laptop.

    Yum!

    3 0 Reply
    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: Could do with that in a laptop.

      But think of the Windows Licensing costs???? Can you afford it? (Only joking)

      1 0 Reply
      1. Tom 7
        Reply Icon

        Re: Could do with that in a laptop.

        If I was dumb enough to put windows on it I'd need one with 32 Wifi cards so it could report home!"

        6 0 Reply
    2. Torben Mogensen
      Reply Icon

      Re: Could do with that in a laptop.

      If you are willing to have a 7kg laptop with a battery life of 30 minutes and a noisy fan running constantly, then by all means.

      0 1 Reply
      1. Steve Cooper
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        Re: Could do with that in a laptop.

        Back to the Pentium 4 days!

        0 0 Reply
  2. fredesmite

    had news about arm

    limited distributions ..many 3rd party Linux components are missing .. limited to what is in the box distribution

    0 1 Reply
    1. joeldillon
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      Re: had news about arm

      Assuming gcc isn't missing, you're not that limited if you're willing to put the work in.

      3 0 Reply
  3. alain williams Silver badge

    Please can we have a real speed metric

    CPU clock does not tell you a lot. Different chips have different numbers of processors. Different processors do different numbers of IPCC (Instructions Per Clock Cycle). Different Instruction sets do different amounts of work per instruction (think: RISC/CISC, or x68_64 vs ARM vs MIPS vs mainframe ...). See here.

    Work done is the only real metric. Something like SPEC is a good starting point. OK: different types of work load use the CPU in different ways so SPEC is not always that good, but it is a much better metric that clock speed.

    This will make it harder for the journalists as vendors like to quote GHz as it is easy and many people don't know better. But most el-reg readers do know better ... so, please, can we have something more meaningful.

    4 1 Reply
    1. Luke McCarthy
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      Re: Please can we have a real speed metric

      The industry standard in this regard is CoreMark. They don't appear to have any scores of any Ampere chips as of yet. https://www.eembc.org/coremark/scores.php

      0 0 Reply

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