It's not even a multiple CPU board...
This is indeed a pretty standard (and weak) ARM server build.
You can get the same CPU M128-30 with 128 3ghz cores for under $800 USD.
You can throw two into a Gigabyte MP72-HB0 and fit it into a full tower case easily.
That'd only cost like $3,200 USD for 256 cores.
RAM is cheap, and that board could take 16 DIMMs.
If you used 16 GB DIMM like OP that's only 256 GB of RAM, in a server, it is not that much... only one gig per core... for like $500 USD.
Maybe for a personal build this seems extravagant but it's nothing special for a server.
Not that much changed since this:
https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2019/10/23/what-is-wrong-w...
It's top1 on everyone's HN because a sufficient number of people (including myself) thought it a nice writeup about fat ARM systems.
Server-side, I also bought used Xeons for an old box and recertified 10TB Exos. No issues there neither.
The HDDs are a bit of a gamble, but for anything else I can only encourage you to buy used!
> It helps that our local Cragslist offers efficient buyer protection.
2-3 years is not a lot. My daily driver laptop is from 2011 and still going strong.
Sure, there are “lemons” out there, but there are also a lot of people who just replace their hardware often.
If anyone knows of any, let me know!
That is just not true.
Nowadays, most OSS software and most server side software will run without any hinch on armv8.
A tremendous amount of work has been done to speed up common software on armv8, partially due to popularity of mobile as a platform but also and to the emergence of ARM servers (Graviton / Neoverses) in the major Cloud providers infrastructure.
Because those cloud offerings have handled for you the problematic case of ARM generally operating as "closed platform" even when everything is open source.
On a PC server, usually you only hit any issues if you want to play with something more exotic on either software or hardware. Bog-standard linux setup is trivial to integrate.
On ARM, even though finally there's UEFI available, I recall that even few years ago there were issues with things like interrupt controller support - and that kind of reputation persists and definitely makes it harder to percolate on-prem ARM.
It also does not help that you need to go for pretty pricy systems to avoid vendor lock-in at firmware compatibility level - or had to, until quite recently.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/:
“Bernstein's report estimates that Graviton represented about 20 percent of AWS CPU instances by mid-2022“
And that’s three years ago. Graviton instances are cheaper than (more or less) equivalent x86 ones on AWS, so I think it’s a safe bet that number has gone up since.
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.
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.
I wonder where this requirement comes from ...
burnt-resistor•4h ago
Q64-22 on eBay (US) for $150-200 USD / 542-723 PLN.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/365380821650
https://www.ebay.com/itm/365572689742
szszrk•3h ago
Also, CPU was hardly the biggest cost here.
Aissen•3h ago