Theres a perception that the ARM Altra per-thread performance is really bad.
But according to my Minecraft benchmarks in Oracle's instances, its better than old Skylake cloud instances... by how much is hard to say since other tenants generate so much variation, but there are proper reviews of the whole SoC floating around out there.
On my workload, using Intel as a baseline. AMD under performs relative to standard benchmarks. ARM over performs relative to standard benchmarks. I have seen good performance from Ampere, particularly for the price.
However, ARM architecture complicates my workflow significantly. I've found that they are not worth using it right now due to compatibility issues, easier to just stick with x86 for most things. Dealing with required missing packages just kills the value.
My system isn't generally compute limited anyway. IOPS and egress dominate rather than MIPS.
Introducing new distros to solve the problem is moving in the wrong direction. It's so much easier to deal with one distro in the cloud. Just more reasons not to go multi uArch.
ARM doesn't support the x86 docker eco system. That's a significant strike but not totally unworkable for me.
My primary database isn't prepackaged with the ARM packages nor does the originating org build one. I could build it myself, which I have done plenty over the years. I did try it, but the dependencies aren't up to date on ARM. So now I'm building dependencies and the software package. Building software from scratch can be a rabbit hole that eats untold amount of time. After a one-day effort I gave up and abandoned it. I'll revisit again if Hetzner brings Ampere to the US and I can verify the instances have much higher IOPS ceilings.
Enter another distro and I have to rebuild all of my provisioning and management scripts for all my services with all the testing entailed in the new dependency chains. I'd rather try to build my db from source again, frankly.
I'm curious what distro you're using where there are missing packages. I've never run across missing distro packages on arm64 Debian (which I regularly use at work).
Ubuntu server itself is pretty arm friendly. But there's a LOT of software that doesn't come with the distro's packaging that one might want to run in the cloud. Docker images and vendor hosted package repos. Everyone does this for x86. Very few do it for ARM. And if you want to try to build-from-source, the dependencies of a lot of pieces are often very out of date on ARM.
There is a kind of after market ARM community that occasionally builds these items. But they are generally pretty out of date.
I don't have an issue with the base distro and what it tries to do, but there are so many random pot holes and road blocks that just don't show up for x86.
I have ARM servers running in production now. But I have workloads that aren't reasonable portable to the uArch and I don't force them there.
I don't think I've ever run into an issue where arm64 packages are older than amd64 packages. Sometimes Debian Stable package versions are old, in which case I use backports, use the company's internal packages (which are often compiled for arm64), or compile it myself. It's no more of an issue on arm64 than on amd64.
I've done a bit of minecraft benchmarking on my Oracle instance. It generates the same number of chunks per second as my 3600x CPU - although minecraft is always a weird benchmark in that benefits from low memory latency and large caches as it is ineffective at using caches well but is memory bound.
We're getting pretty good performance on AWS Graviton3 for our data processing, their m7g is pretty good. Looks like they're banking on ARM taking off, with lots of new options in 2023.
> The company is set to only make the hardware available for priority scale-out customers who have already designed quad-socket and eight-socket platforms around the hardware.
I work at one of those customers; we use loads of them.
Nevermind Ice Lake / Alder Lake (2021) / Raptor Lake (2022) -- Intel hasn't abandoned the "Lake" naming scheme yet.
No, starting with Ice Lake these are on the first actually-new core micro architecture after Skylake (it’s the “Cove” family, starting with Sunny Cove in Ice Lake). They have Lake in the name but these are actually a new micro architecture, finally, not Skylake family.
Also, by "Skylake" I mean whatever the last popular server CPU with the Skylake derived core was... IIRC Cooper Lake was Facebook only, Cascade Lake was HPC, and I cant even remember beyond that, but they've had the same 28C server die forever that hosts everywhere use.
The new Altra developer kit is also very cheap. I wonder if Ampere is dumping overstocked inventory. Given their track record I don't expect the One to be available any time soon.
This wisdom is a bit outdated, especially on heavily modded servers.
Minecraft is limited by a single thread, but some stuff does run on other threads. In addition the JDK will do compilation and GC on other threads now, which is especially apparent if you run GraalVM like you should.
Minecraft wont scale to 16 cores. But if you buy a 2C/4T instance, you are going to get less performance than you would get on a wider one.
> Minecraft is limited by a single thread, but some stuff does run on other threads
Hmm, not so outdated. if you’re talking about JVM gc then sure but pretty much everything is built around a single thread ticking the mod. I know some mods can do chunk pregen on another thread but those are rarely used.
But according to my Minecraft benchmarks in Oracle's instances, its better than old Skylake cloud instances... by how much is hard to say since other tenants generate so much variation, but there are proper reviews of the whole SoC floating around out there.