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> I wonder if a Q32-17 workstation could be put together for cheaper than whatever the cheapest Apple M1 pro device is

Nah. You can't just get a chip & mainboard retail since there is basically no market for that.

About the only option for an Altra workstation is a prebuilt for "as low as $7661" :(

https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstati...

Someone needs the courage to make a motherboard and CPU with off the shelf parts and a socketed chip in the non-x86 space. That was one of the key reasons that the IBM PC succeeded: it was easy to clone. Without that it's likely it would have been just another interesting footnote in history. But because IBM didn't take the time to do everything custom and locked in others were able to enter the market and make things happen. Honestly I don't think anyone sells socketed ARM64 or RISC-V chips. There might be OpenPOWER but I don't think anyone is really fabbing them at a cost that a consumer could even consider.

Sadly I don't think that sort of courage is in copious supply it's always easier to vendor lock people than it is to take the risk of someone else eating your lunch. So until that happens I just don't see non-x86 platforms really eating into the desktop/laptop market in any large share.

AMD actually did this in the distant past with the original 32-bit Athlons.

They used the DEC Alpha EV6 bus from the 21264 microprocessor. It would be interesting to have seen DEC StrongARM adapted to the same bus, and a single motherboard able to run any of these CPUs with the right BIOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_A

Other than BIOS/UEFI as far as I know nothing is stopping them from using existing chipsets/motherboards. I don't recall anything on the chipset itself being inherently tied to x86 per se. I think even port IO is handled in the SOC/microcode these days. So they could probably do it. Particularly if they reused things like the AMD IO die etc. No need to reinvent the wheel because the cores are different.

UEFI is also ported to ARM64 and officially supported by Windows on compatible boards.

Well, Raspberry Pi, with the Compute Module 4 has done this on the low-end and an ecosystem appears to be developing rapidly with a wide variety of carrier boards and a handful of 3rd-party compute module cards (e.g. Pine64 SOQuartz and the Radxa CM3)

> Someone needs the courage to make a motherboard and CPU with off the shelf parts and a socketed chip in the non-x86 space.

Honestly? If they want an easy win, that someone should be Intel or AMD.

They already design and release desktop and mobile chipsets with "platform specs" that are designed to be copied wholesale by all the major motherboard and PC vendors.

If Intel released a socketed ARM CPU with a chipset and a platform spec to go with it, you'd be able to buy a motherboard for it from ASUS or MSI for $150 within six months.

AMD's original plan for Zen was to have an x86 chip + socket-compatible ARM chip as well.

AMD didn't seem to have the funding needed to execute this plan though, and killed the ARM-project. To be fair, AMD was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy at this time, and it probably was just too much risk for them to even attempt to such a strange and risky strategy.

AMD did release a few ARM chips to test the waters. But the ARM-based AMD chips never sold in high numbers or got much demand, so AMD doubled-down on x86-only Zen chips instead.

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Allegedly, AMD still owns their ARM-based decoder and therefore can convert their Zen-chips over from x86 into ARM-based instructions if they ever felt like it made business sense. Given how successful EPYC is however, there's probably no need for AMD to do something this risky (might as well keep selling these x86 chips like hotcakes, AMD is practically supply-constrained as it is and doesn't need to do weird things like that to sell its chips)

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See:

* https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

> That was one of the key reasons that the IBM PC succeeded: it was easy to clone. Without that it's likely it would have been just another interesting footnote in history. But because IBM didn't take the time to do everything custom and locked in others were able to enter the market and make things happen.

I’m reasonable sure IBM PCs were totally custom and locked down, and they got reverse engineered enabling “IBM Compatible” clones to spring up.

The IBM PC was the first computer IBM made that used entirely off the shelf chips except one: the BIOS

The BIOS chip was just copied outright for the first clones, but that was ruled illegal in court so later compatibles reverse engineered the code and made their own.

I don't think anyone is really fabbing them at a cost that a consumer could even consider.

What are the Chinese getting up to?

Ouch. I (hypothetically -- some alternative version of me that had more free time and free money) would be willing to pay some early adopter, "I'm buying fun parts" tax, but $7k for 32 threads @ 1.7GHz is a bit much even for hypothesizing. I wonder what they have in mind for that chip, then.

It's mainly intended as a server CPU, which often go for for lots of cores / threads over maximum single core clockspeed. That 32 core / 1.7GHz config doesn't seem too hot for either though.

The workstation is presumably intended as a developer tool really, for those that want real hardware on hand instead of remote access (and don't want a noisy server in an office). Going to be even more niche and low volume than the server versions, so gonna cost a fair chunk.

For fun parts you can get an NXP LX2160A board from SolidRun (or the earlier Marvell Armada8k one).

The performance wouldn't be competitive (Cortex-A72 is really old by now) but it's nice to have a proper arm64 desktop.

If datacenters adopt it in a few years we will be able to get the decomm'd stuff - once the hardware refresh cycles hit ebay and the like will be flooded with stuff.

> Edit: It is neat to see that they've got a chip under $1k. I wonder if a Q32-17 workstation could be put together for cheaper than whatever the cheapest Apple M1 pro device is, to experiment with computationally crunchy Arm codes.

The cheapest M1P device is currently rather expensive ($2k for the 8-cores 14") but there'll almost certainly be an M1P mini for about the same price as the current (still on intel) high-ender: $1100.

A Q32-17 leaves you with $300 for a bespoke box around the CPU. For such a CPU class I'd expect the mainboard alone to exceed that budget. Even if the Mini is price-bumped to, say, 1500 (which would be somewhat in-line with the 13" -> 14" price differential) I don't think you can get even just the guts of an Altra-based workstation for less than the price of the processor.

Yeah. Someone in another branch linked a site selling Ampere workstations, couldn't find anything under ~$7k.

I think if we want to drop ~$7k on ARM computers to play around with for some reason, we'd be better off waiting for a hypothetical M1P mini. Plus you could get a handful of the things and make an adorable mini cluster -- then you get to deal with MPI which will make for a more fun experiment anyway.

and that 7k is without storage and with a relatively small ram selection. Realistically the workstation is more like 10-15k.

It would be nice to have some competition to Apple in this space, but with the rumored Apple Silicon Mac Pro on the horizon that might be the best bet: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/02/smaller-mac-pro-w...

There's cheaper arm workstations that smoke the usual embedded chips. They need to drop the price before devs will really want it.

An alternative could be Jetson AGX Orin - 2048 Cores @ 1000MHz.

Q32-17 may have 32 cores, may have 45W TDP and may have whooping 128 pcie 4.0 lanes but it is still only 1.7GHz.

What this means in practice is that this will heavily depend on the type of load you are running. A lot of workstation type loads just can't make use of 32 threads and on that CPU it will have to just to offset for the slower single core performance.

I'm thinking more as a developer machine to prepare for the future, rather than as a real productivity workstation. Assuming the predictions of ARM ascendancy actually come true (certainly remains to be seen) you should want your code to run well on 32 ARM cores @1.7GHz, because that means it'll run really well on the production workstations that come out in a couple years, right?

If production workstations become ARM based, wouldn't it be more likely that we get 2-4 high-speed (3-4GHz) cores and a large number of low speed cores? That's analogous to smartphone architectures with their low-power cores and high-speed/high-power cores, and better matches how real-world workloads behave.

So the smaller cores could be more like throughput-tuned efficiency cores, rather than 100% power saving cores -- kind of like Alder Lake? Seems like a neat idea. Almost like a Xeon + Xeon Phi, but on a chip. Seem like that'd get around the communication issue of the Phi and probably the compatibility issues as well.

Apple used an A12z bionic for people to prepare for M1 and their derivatives which has a big-little configuration . I don’t see this or any other server with this configuration at all. A ARM workstation would definitely have this which begs the question that a Mac with apple silicon would be the developer machine to prepare for the future .

One application, where this type of processor makes sense, is network based middleboxes. Think of things like firewalls that have evolved to have a lot of different functionality and a need for a lot of simultaneous thread processing availability. This type of chip on a SmartNIC could be very popular. And while this is a bit niche I'm sure there are plenty of other use cases. E.g. nodes running a lot of FaaS containers, VPS providers looking to offer higher CPU count but lower clock speeds, etc.

The 1.7GHz boost speed is a significant limitation.

Ignoring architecture differences for a moment, that’s about 1/2 the clock speed of something like an M1 or even a modern cell phone chip. It’s almost 1/3 of the boost clock of a modern Intel or AMD desktop chip.

Given the choice and assuming equal cache sizes, I’d take a 3.4GHz version with 16 cores over a 1.7GHz version with 32 cores.

The only time a higher core count with proportionally lower clock speed really helps is when you’re going for raw power efficiency.

It's also quite a niche use case... An application fine with low single thread performance, that is highly parallelizable, requiring hundreds of threads, but with sufficiently branchy execution that CUDA/GPU doesn't work out... Oh, and it also no binary blobs, or you won't be able to port to ARM.

Sounds like exactly the use case of a server. Rack space is expensive, condensing it can save the operators money.

Turning the "vs CUDA" question around, why would you prefer to program a GPU? The dev experience and available progranming languages are worse there plus you are coding to a proprietary hw and sw stack that can't produce portable apps.

I would love an ARM-based linux workstation, but I'm not willing to pay the extreme Apple premium for whatever an M1-based Mac Pro is going to cost.

I wonder how the pricing will end up. At the baseline, $1200 for a MacBook Air with 16 gigs of ram is great value for the machine you get, even compared to Windows alternatives. For the new MacBook Pros, there are multiple companies who felt that they were worth shelling out for top of the line configs outside of their normal refresh cycles. Maybe Apple will price their top of the line stuff for a reasonable price/performance ratio, or they might think that the people who actually need that config would be willing to pay sky high prices and charge accordingly.

A Mac mini starts at $699 and is more than capable (by specs, anyway) to run as a Linux workstation.

The M1 mac mini (my wife has one) tops out at 16GB of RAM and has limited expandability. Not exactly "workstation" class.

Now, a small tower built around an M1 Pro/Max with a few expansion slots at a reasonable price would get my attention.

Love to see compiler benchmark (compile firefox, chrome) on this vs system with EPYC 64C/128T or 128C/256T.