News Ampere's New 128-Core Arm Workstation Runs Windows

[Admin]

Ampere teases its devkits running Windows with GeForce RTX.

Ampere's New 128-Core Arm Workstation Runs Windows : Read more

 

[ezst036]

It's nice to see that ATX board there. That's something that's been sorely missing from much of the ARM/RISC news and developments.

 

[atomicWAR]

I'd love Nvidia and others to start creating ARM mobo's for windows on the regular.

 

[bit_user]

It might be slightly off the mark to attribute these to Ampere. They're by ADLINK, which is a large OEM of industrial computing systems. Their IPI business seems aimed specifically at the dev kit market. So, I'm not sure how much Ampere had to do with this.

Overall, there's nothing new here. The CPUs are from their Altra line, launched back in 2020. You could already buy workstations featuring them for a couple years, if you didn't want to buy one of Gigabyte's servers or rent time on one of Google's Altra cloud instances.

As for Nvidia support, they've been supporting their GPUs on ARM for the past 5 years, at least. Not to say there's zero effort in making sure everything works on a new platform, but you'd pretty much expect it to work. To be fair, I guess I've never heard of Nvidia GPUs working under Windows on ARM - that's news to me!

Beyond that, the only other thing that's notable about these is the price, which is pretty decent and I think a lot less than I've seen other Altra workstations selling for. Then again, Altra is getting pretty long in the tooth, being based on ARM's A76 cores (in their Neoverse N1 incarnation). Single-thread performance leaves a lot to be desired, especially with the sub-3 GHz clockspeeds mentioned.

 

[bit_user]

I'd love Nvidia and others to start creating ARM mobo's for windows on the regular.

The closest you're likely to see is if they get Windows running on one of the Jetson boards. The Orin AGX has rather respectable specs:

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-modules#jetson_agx_orin​

Well... the CPU cores apparently only clock up to 2.2 GHz, so not that interesting. Still, 12x A78 cores is definitely closer to Desktop PC performance than it is to a Raspberry Pi.

What would be really nice is to have a carrier board that you could plug a 72-core Grace CPU into. Somehow, I don't see that happening. It wouldn't be cheap either.

 

[Spuwho]

NVidia owns 17% of Ampere. If NVidia had bought ARM they would have owned 38% of Ampere.

Beware of these cheap "developer kits". They look enticing until you see that they almost always use technology that is at or near EOL.

Altra N1, DDR4 should be your first clue that some integrator is unloading inventory.

Microsoft did the same thing with their ARM developer kit. Before it died Marvell did the same with the ThunderX2. Qualcomm's was a joke. It's just an unload.

 

[Steve Nord_]

Wow, makes you wonder who's gonna buy the $2k devkit rather than load up Ghidra.

 

[atomicWAR]

The closest you're likely to see is if they get Windows running on one of the Jetson boards. The Orin AGX has rather respectable specs:

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-modules#jetson_agx_orin​

Well... the CPU cores apparently only clock up to 2.2 GHz, so not that interesting. Still, 12x A78 cores is definitely closer to Desktop PC performance than it is to a Raspberry Pi.

What would be really nice is to have a carrier board that you could plug a 72-core Grace CPU into. Somehow, I don't see that happening. It wouldn't be cheap either.

I pondered playing with Nvidia boards for Windows but haven't as of yet. I tend to run a Windows based NAS (so it can run double duty as a back up rig/ remote renderer for video back-up, etc)...its in use cases like that I could see myself going arm. Where gaming is off the board, pun intended, and low power with good network/disk throughput is more important. It be more for fun at this point. I'll let you know if I ever dive head first and try it out. Thx as always for your reply!