80-core ARM CPU to bring lower power, higher density to a rack near you

Enlarge / “Cloud Native” can also be taken to mean “not for you, unless you plan to buy entire racks full of them.”

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ARM CPU vendor Ampere announced an 80-core CPU called the Altra on Tuesday. If the core count didn’t clue you in already, the Altra is aimed at data-center computing rather than home or even typical business needs. The Altra’s 80 cores do not offer hyperthreading, so 80 cores here means 80 threads as well.

Before we go into too much detail about the Altra—which is currently sampling but is not yet generally available and does not have any third-party benchmarks—it’s instructive to take a look slightly backward to its little sibling, the 32-core eMAG 8180.

Before Altra, there was (and is) eMAG

Running ApacheBench vs. Nginx gives us the closest thing to a “general-purpose” performance comparison. Ampere runs about half as fast as the competition here—but note the much narrower error-bar.
Redis is a key-value store, similar to memcached but more complex—and not natively multi-threaded. Multiple instances of redis are running simultaneously to produce “multi-threaded” results here.
Memcached is a key-value store, typically used to cache database query results (raw or post-processed), with an extremely memory-focused workload.

The Altra is not Ampere’s first entry into data-center ARM computing. Its last processor, the eMAG 8180, is a 32-core part running at up to

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