In context: Ampere’s Arm-based Altra processor lineup options spectacular energy effectivity and efficiency, superior to x86 alternate options in some conditions. They arrive with multi-socket assist, with the corporate providing fashions with as much as 128 cores.
Overclocker and YouTuber der8auer posted a brand new video showcasing the efficiency of an Ampere Altra Q80-30 server processor and even delidded a pattern to see what’s beneath the IHS.
The Altra Q80-30 options 80 QuickSilver cores (primarily based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 structure derived from the Cortex-A76 present in some smartphone SoCs) and makes use of TSMC’s N7 manufacturing course of. It helps 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, eight channels of DDR4 reminiscence, and has a most frequency of 3GHz.
Der8auer ran Geekbench 5 on an air-cooled server powered by certainly one of these chips and bought a whopping 44,425 multi-core rating. For comparability, the present world report holder, a liquid-cooled AMD Threadripper 3990X that includes a large overclock, solely bought 34,735 factors in the identical take a look at. The YouTuber additionally famous the spectacular energy effectivity of the Arm processor, with CPU-only energy draw peaking at simply 180W throughout testing.
Later within the video, der8auer delidded an Altra Q80-30 pattern (presumably already lifeless) utilizing the vice methodology. Surprisingly, Ampere opted to make use of customary thermal paste because the thermal interface materials as an alternative of soldering the IHS to the CPU die like Intel and AMD normally do. The corporate possible took this route as a result of it is less expensive, as Arm processors are simpler to chill than x86 designs on account of their superior energy effectivity.
The CPU die of the Altra Q80-30 measures about 22.5 mm x 25.5 mm, leading to a floor space of 574 mm2. Der8auer in contrast it side-by-side with an 18-core Intel Core i9-7980XE constructed on a 14nm node, which has a die measurement of 480 mm2. Nevertheless, the Ampere chip has a bigger substrate and over twice the variety of pads on the again on account of supporting much more PCIe lanes.
