Re: Someone installed an aarch64 Christmas gift: There is now a ampere4 with 150 or so FreeBSD CPUs and 24 builders running in parallel [an ampere5 exists too]

Philip Paeps <philip_at_freebsd.org> wrote on
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:03:38 UTC :

> On 2025-12-29 18:14:11 (+0800), Ronald Klop wrote:
> > Do you have some info about the new ampere4 and ampere5 servers? Maybe some tech specs and the expected use cases.
> 
> ampere4 and ampere5 are obscenely deep 2U machines that have been sitting in storage for a while because we didn't have racks that could accommodate them.
> 
> They're both Ampere Mt Collins machines.

So much for my earlier guessing.

QUOTE from Ampere_Mt._Collins_2U_PB_v0.50_20210223.pdf :
Available in a dual socket configuration in a 2U form-factor with the Ampere Altra®
and Altra® Max processors, Mt. Collins provides 160 cores . . .
END QUOTE

If I understand right, that means armv7 user space code likely is
supported (Altra variants).

"8x 72-bit DDR4-3200 channels" and "Up to 16 DIMMs and 4 TB/socket".
(2 DIMMs per channel are allowed.)

> Two CPUs each, for 160 cores per machine. There's 256G memory in ampere4 (16*16G) and 128G in ampere5 (8*32G).

128 GiBytes would be 4*32GiB or 8*16GiB.

> We've ordered more memory for ampere5 (another 8*32G).

I'm guessing 8*16GiB based on expecting similar end configurations
to ampere4 and its 16*16GiB, so: 256 GiB in the end for ampere5?

> That should show up in the next week or so.

Cool.

> They're both on a single drive (well - flimsy non-hot swap NVMe) for the time being. More drives have been ordered for them. These should also arrive in the next week or so.

Also cool.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com