No it is not setting records, but we felt that it was capable enough to help crack the existing chicken and egg problem. We could provide a SystemReady Arm platform that could help bridge the divide and provide developers a native Aarch64 platform that wasn't $3000+ HoneyComb has helped bring better Aarch64 support to many OSS projects getting things ready for better SOCs once they become available.
One of the positives of having lots of non-speed-record-setting cores instead of few single-threading-monsters is that it helps people learn to write parallel programs.
I wish we could give all software engineers CPUs with 64 Atom (or ARM53) cores and force them to write software that performs well that way.
I am myself guilty of that - many of my build scripts didn't bother to run on more than one core until I got a burner laptop that has horrendous single-thread performance (but 4 threads). Now the big laptop runs them virtually instantaneously.
That's a fair point but the reality is this -- if you work on large-ish or actually large codebase (think like, Open Office sized codebases, not your random run of the mill npm package) today and you want to maintain it, publish packages, do work, integrate a CI builder, etc -- it doesn't really matter. You need RAM, cores, and importantly, a fast drive. Basically the only things that can fit this bill at sub-$1000 USD, are:
- Virtualized Linux on an M1 Mac. (Limited RAM since the M1 caps at 16GB, but viable.)
- Jetson Xavier AGX. (Good for ML and overall strong SoC, but the proprietary bits get in the way e.g. if you want a new kernel version.)
- This thing. (OK cores, but 64GB RAM and M.2)
Hilariously, the newest entry in this list is actually the M1 Mac (both the AGX and Honeycomb date to 2019/2020.)
Unless you're going to start subsidizing boards, somehow. You're not going to see Neoverse in a developer workstation at a similar price point until the market either flourishes substantially (months, years from now) and the volume allows lower pricing, or a sugar daddy company somewhere decides to just set money on fire and directly subsidize sales directly to you. Part of this is the same problem where you have to buy both the CPU and the motherboard together, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter.
In the first half of next year, Jetson AGX Xavier will be superseded by Jetson AGX Orin at the same price point, which has 12x Cortex-A78AE. Will be quite a nice bump.
At the same time, the SW stack will switch to UEFI for the bootloader, including support for the latest kernels. (but, Jetson Nano/TX1/TX2/TX2 NX will no longer be supported by the new stack)
The extra cores are welcome, but, for a workstation, the eMMC is limiting. And I have emotional scars from Nvidia GPUs in desktop Linux computers, so I'll pass this one.
Well, you can get an M1 Mac Mini for about the same price.
A 4-core VM running on my M1 MBP builds stuff nearly as fast as a bare-metal 64-core Ampere EMAG. So I'm guessing the M1 would run circles around 16 A72s..
It seems to be setting price records with $750. Ugh. I mean, I get the reasons, but I'd probably rather build a cluster of 8GB RPi4's. For $750, it better be that X1/N1.
Some things are more reliable and fail safe than others. SD would not rank high on that list and that's not even talking about the cheap mechanical connector involved.
I don't think ARM chips will take off on "real computers" until you can buy CPUs and motherboards independently. And if that is difficult for technical reasons (e.g., no standardized BIOS/hardware discoverability -- I'm just extrapolating from ARM-based dev boards I have used, maybe this exists on computers like this) then I think it's going to take a long time -- perhaps RISC-V-based "real computers" will appear before that.
socketed Arm SOCs are very unlikely because there are so many vendors making them. This works on the x86_64 side because you basically have Intel and AMD and they each have their own manufacturing ecosystem and target sockets. That is why we chose CEX7 since it is a standard that allows the motherboard to be customized to the use case.
I too turned this offering down after considering that I don't want to lug around 16 A72's. It is certainly an interesting board, and if you are a hobbyist in need of an ARM server I see no better options, but I think we will see much more interesting boards in the future.
We don't make the SOCs, just implement them. The only other available SOC that is N1 is the Ampere Altra and you will not be able to provide a < $1000 system with that. Also the SOC itself is almost as large as the entire CEX7 module. This system was never meant to out perform the latest CPUs on the market. It is a developer tool to fill a niche and help advance the SystemReady ecosystem. We liked the fit because after faster more desktop ready SOCs are available this doesn't become ewaste, but can easily re-purpose into a micro-server or other network development platform.
