GIGABYTE was the first to market with the MP72-HB0 dual-socket motherboard, which supports up to 256 Arm cores and is perfect for cloud-native applications.... Gigabyte launches 256-core (Arm) Ready CPU based motherboard
Pretty impressive for an ARM server. At first I was going to say the TDP is underwhelming until I realized that's about 2W per core, which is pretty good. Also, the block diagrams are pretty interesting. Apparently each CPU handles pretty different things. In general, one handles external I/O (USB, networking, displays, etc) while the other handles internal I/O (PCIe and storage). I could see this being good in the sense that it can minimize data being juggled across the CPUs, but it could be a problem if one of the CPUs is waiting on the other to fetch data.
do they really 'need' smt when there are 256 of them? I feel like the overhead would not be worth it.
80 core version beats threadripper 128 thread and with less power consumption. Also ARM doesn't make processors, they make the instruction set, so obviously not x86 chip.
sadly you can't do any job in ARM, it would be interesting to try to run some render engines in those processors using windows for ARM to check, i use a lot unreal for my job and that software ask for a lot of horsepower, i use an i9 11900K and it eats it like a cookie.
Hah well that's like asking "is Swahili the national language of Japan?" ARM is distinguished because they don't use x86. The architecture of these CPUs is part of the ARMv8.2 family with aarch64 binary compatibility. Sure you can. While Windows is pretty much just limited to Qualcomm chips, ARM is a perfect solution for web servers, where you don't need a lot of processing power but you need high availability and low latency with minimal power draw while idle. ARM is also suitable for workloads that are heavy with GPU compute, since you really just need the CPU as a medium to compile code and interact with the GPUs. Don't forget that nearly all phones and most routers (including many server-grade routers) run on ARM.
that is some really nice wattage per core...i am sure alot of would like to see such thing with amd and intel..
what i mean is that you can't just install the correct hardware on this board and expect to compare it with a loaded up threadripper system, you need at least a lot of recompiling before you can compare both systems, it is cool tech but i see it very far in time from workstation use, at least for my use case (3d stuff)
Oh right, well, this is a server platform so that's to be expected. ARM has really no purpose in workstations, unless you add a bunch of advanced instructions like Apple did. Even then, M1 or M2 still lack some major performance grunt for certain workloads.
Where do the 64 lanes go? Each CPU has 128, so 2x 128 = 256. But 2P is just able to feed 192 lanes. Are the remaining ones used as CPU interconnect, 32 lanes wide?
Well, what's your definition of desktop? If you mean something that physically complies as a desktop board (so, like ATX or ITX) then there are actually several options. The Firefly ITX-3588J is just as feature-rich as many BGA x86 boards, for example. If you mean something that can work with most desktop PCIe cards, ARM will definitely fall short. There are many boards (like the Firefly) that support things like PCIe and M.2 but even if you can compile the drivers and port the firmware (which is already a challenge for most), the way ARM communicates over PCIe is different enough that more advanced devices like a GPU probably won't [fully] work. If you mean something that can fluidly run a desktop OS (like Windows or a Linux distro with a desktop environment installed) then most ARM platforms since ARMv7 (and many before that) can do that. If you mean something that is binary compatible with typical desktop software (like an office suite, web browser, media player, etc) that becomes more of a gray area, because compatibility layers like Rosetta 2 (Mac), ARM64EC (Windows), binfmt_misc (everything else), you can run a hell of a lot more stuff.
if you enjoy not so tecnical content about this things, i can recomend you this channel on youtube the guy is trying to run gpus on a raspberry pi.
I considered bringing him up but figured that was getting a little too tangential. I'm not subscribed (because I think there's a lot more interesting products to work on than RPis) but yeah, he's done quite a lot to help push the capabilities of ARM.
