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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

In multi-thread benchmarks of raw memory I/O we found a clear performance leader in Ampere’s eMAG, outperforming both AMD’s EPYC and Intel’s XEON CPUs by a factor of 6 or higher

That doesn't sound right. Neither AMD nor Intel get more than a handful of GB/s in basic memory I/O? Any idea what could be wrong?

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Upfront they say:

"It should be noted that Kinvolk has ongoing cooperation with both Ampere Computing and Packet, and used all infrastructure used in our benchmarking free of charge. Ampere Computing furthermore sponsored the development of the control plane automation used to issue benchmark runs, and to collect resulting data points, and to produce charts."

I'm not saying anything was intentionally done, but optimizations were likely done on the Ampere side.

It doesn't sound remotely right to me either. It could be NUMA since the Intel and AMD systems are NUMA but the eMAG is not. The code for this benchmark appears to be https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/blob/master/src/tests/m... which... is not an interesting way to benchmark a large server IMO. Running a single process with a lot of threads and a lot of RAM on a NUMA server is going to perform poorly (unless you do a lot of tuning which I don't recommend either). "Microservices" might run a lot faster.

Are you sure about that? I got the impression that should work well under Linux, unless you create a lot of contention.

I ran sysbench memory on dual-channel six-core MacBook and it scores 18311.19 MiB/sec, higher than either of those x64 behemoths. Something seems off.

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