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Bought myself an Ampere Altra system

(marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl)
204 points pabs3 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.364s | source
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maz1b ◴[] No.44420099[source]
I've always wondered why there isn't a bigger market / offering for dedicated servers with Ampere at their heart (apart from Hetzner)

If anyone knows of any, let me know!

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moffkalast ◴[] No.44420905[source]
They're slow and the arch is less compatible? Arm cores in web hosting are typically known as the shit-tier.

I think the main use case for these is some sort of Android build farm, as a CI/CD pipeline with testing of different OS versions and general app building, since they don't have to emulate arm.

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dijit ◴[] No.44421237[source]
Well, I've run some Ampere Altra ARM machines in my studio so I can speak to this;

A) No you can't use ARM as android build farms, as androids build tools only work on x86 (go figure).

B) Ampere Altra runs faster for throughput than x86 on the same lithography and clock frequency; I can't imagine how they'd be slower for web, it's not my experience with these machines under test. Maybe virtualisation has issues (I ran bare-metal containers - as you should).

My original intent was to use these machines as build/test clusters for our go microservices (and I'd run ARM on GCP) but GCP was a bit too slow to roll out and now we're far into feature locking any migrations of that.

So I added the machines to the general pool of compute and they run bots, internal webservices etc; with Kubernetes.

The performance is extremely good, only limited by the fact we can't use them as build machines for the game due to the architecture difference - however for storage or heavy compute they really outperform the EPYC Milan machines which are also on a 7nm lithography.

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zozbot234 ◴[] No.44421526[source]
> No you can't use ARM as android build farms, as androids build tools only work on x86 (go figure).

Does qemu-user solve that, or are there special requirements due to JIT and the like that qemu-user can't support?

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1. dijit ◴[] No.44424566[source]
I'm not sure I'm comfortable buying hardware for build systems that has to emulate an instruction set to build.

Doubly-so when that hardware has a native instruction set originally to the target.