Fujitsu A64FX Microarchitecture Manual [pdf]
github.com
github.com
(search for TRM)
Xavier has 8 Carmel cores and Parker/X2 has 2 Denver2 cores and 4 Cortex-A57s. The SoC manual includes instruction timings for the NV cores.
They're not a small player. They used to make UltraSPARCs, but since Sun / Oracle is a toxic wasteland now, its natural for them to move to ARM instead.
The previous Fujitsu supercomputer, the K, was also #1 when it came out in 2011. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer)
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The main thing that been proven is that a company like Fujitsu can transition between ISAs: the SPARC ISA into the ARM ISA, and not miss a beat.
If Fujitsu really did out engineered IBM counterparts, that would be an astonishing achievement.
This model has been very successful for them domestically, but it also makes them uniquely unsuited to competing in global markets where they have no brand to speak of.
Another issue is cost vs. quality. Japanese manufacturers including Fujitsu despise low quality and assume their customers are always willing to pay for the best. Don't break things, even if at the expense of moving slow. This assumption generally holds domestically, but not in global markets.
What I said above may be changing. But slowly.
The rumor was NSA still was going with DEC Alpha fabs long after DECs demise.
My government has to buy American/Chinese stuff AFAIK. Housing ASML doesn't give an equal advantage, right?
I would guess this particular iceberg is at least 90% above the surface. It appears to be bog-standard industrial policy which in large part does not necessitate secret stuff. I make this conjecture partly by reference to other industries in Japan, whose comparable government support could certainly not be explained in that way.
The problem with PC market is how they trained consumers into buying Spec. At first people would compare clock speed, and Memory capacity, later they learned CPU Generation was also important and Memory Speed, and then dozens of other things. And basically becomes a commodity market.
Nearly ALL PC manufacture moved their assembly to China. Fujitsu remained MIJ for as long as I could remember ( And may be that is still the case ).
There is also a culture problem. Which I think matter a lot more as they are factored into their decision making.
PCs and mobile devices have recently been moved into separate subsidiaries. Presumably ahead of a divestiture / major reorg.
I'm not in that business/role, so I don't know how they compare to e.g. Dell or HP; especially regarding support. But I've got one of their older 1U rackmounts in my basement and it's a pretty nice machine.
it's been 15 years since I've seen a fujitsu desktop in EU. I mean I regularly see way more panasonic toughbooks around and it's actually rare.
The second part of the issue is "head start." For literally decades the "cost" of a computer architecture was perhaps 3% chips and 97% software support for those chips. The "Windows" lock (by having the #1 OS run only on x86 architecture machines) meant that Intel really didn't have to do anything for years but shrink their transistor size and they could "win."
Linux took away the Windows "moat", networking took away the "enterprise server" moat, and gcc took away the "compiler/tools" moat. Between the three of them it gave everyone a chance to play if they wanted to stake out a niche.
ARM took "low power" and captured phones for which battery power is key. By licensing the architecture widely and inexpensively they enabled parallel investment that well exceeded anything a single manufacturer could apply to a particular architecture. By some estimates you have over $50 billion dollars / year being spent on R&D that accelerates ARM compared to Intel's $15 billion R&D budget for 2020? Not so much "blowing their head start" as is it getting mowed down by not being able to invest as much as the other guys.
Arm is attacking Intel at the top and bottom and middle leaving less and less space for them to operate.
Intel lost embedded to arm first. Then the lost mobile. Then they lost the Apple laptops and later this year the Apple desktops. They are starting to lose the super computers. The nail in the coffin will come with the cloud servers if those vendors could get something close to Apple’s custom Arm cpu performance.
Honestly it would be brilliant for Apple to start offering Mx cpus in the cloud at affordable rates to the various cloud providers.
Amazon's Graviton2 and Ampere's Altra are tackling that IO bound space. They have dozens of single thread cores, lots of memory channels, and lots of PCI Express lanes (64 and 128 respectively IIRC). They're not slouches in CPU power but their IO is really impressive.
Having high power and high bandwidth chips at a fraction of the power of Xeons is a win for cloud providers. They can either get higher density in the same power/cooling envelope or reduce their power/cooling requirements for the same capacity. At cloud provider scale power is a major cost driver.
AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers.
HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business.
HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market.
HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon.
AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing x86 services to those who needs it )
Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server.
>The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there.
Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86 instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU = Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30% cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by large margin.
If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time, that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market.
Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. The lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very hard, had no experience in market and product business. Luckily that is about to change.
Evaluating ARM switch takes time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly, getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.
People I work with test my software on MS Azure cloud VM with some recent AMD Epyc CPU.
> for Apple to start offering Mx cpus in the cloud at affordable rates
Large part how these Apple's ARM chips are so fast is integration. Just removing DDR4 wires improves memory latency by multiple CPU cycles due to speed of signal in copper. For servers you probably wouldn't want integration, you'd want DIMMs to replace just the failed parts, with ECC.
Other things, like RDBMS servers, can’t do that or at least not so easy. For them you actually want loads or RAM in the servers.
I don’t think it’s practical to manufacture SOCs with hundreds of GB of DDR4 in the package. The package gets too large, also economy of scale is not that great compared to phones or laptops.
The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O).
[1] It sucks BTW, Android gave up trying to fix all of the byte ordering problems and so many of the apps fail to execute correctly.
What byte ordering problems could affect x86??
The only big endian platform Android was ported to was MIPS.
Maybe what you're seeing is apps with native components that are only compiled for armv6/7.
Top500 is based on the HPL benchmark. Its problems are specifically not being sensitive to memory and networking (specifically network latency). That's why half(?) of it is things like "cloud vendor", where you're not going to run typical HPC codes past three nodes.
Fujitsu just has good tech. Its kind of mysterious since its aimed at the Japanese market instead of the US market, so we don't hear much about it. But its clearly a world-class processor company.
I know some of Fujitsu's A64 modules were making it into Cray systems as well; isn't that what U. Bristol has?
Further, they use their private llvm branch and haven't pushed the pipeline description tables for AFAIK any of their arm chips to upstream llvm.
So while I agree it would be interesting, I wouldn't hold my breath.