ampere

System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development.

But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest Ampere-based computer to come to market.

I initially ran my gauntlet of tests under Ubuntu 24.04 (the OS this workstation ships with), but after discovering System76 dropped in ASRock Rack's TPM 2.0 module, I switched tracks and installed Windows 11—which went without a hitch!

Currently there are precious few SystemReady Arm computers—computers like the System76 Thelio Astra I was sent recently to test.

The level or 'band' of SystemReady SR used by modern Ampere-based arm64 workstations and servers means you can install any out-of-the-box Linux distributions, as long as they provide an arm64-compatible installer.

Ubuntu has some of the most complete support for arm64, so I went to download a Live CD ISO I could flash to a USB stick, to install on my test Thelio Astra. For server installs (with no GUI), either 4k or 64k page sizes, there are easily-findable ISOs:

• Ubuntu Server for Arm

However, for desktop, you can only get it via daily build downloads:

Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket!

Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is inside the box pictured above.

It has 192 custom Arm cores running at 3.2 Gigahertz, and in some benchmarks, it stays in the ring with AMD's fastest EPYC chip, the 9965 "Turin Dense", which also has 192 cores.

High-core-count servers are the cutting edge in datacenters, and they're so insane, most software doesn't even know how to handle it. btop has to go full screen on the CPU graph just to fit all the cores:

It's not cheap, but it's efficient. At least, that's my hope.

Over the past few months, I worked with a number of vendors to assemble what I hope will make an efficient but high-performance arm64 NAS. In the video embedded below, I've put together the following (some of these links are affiliate links):

This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster.

I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro.

128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to upgrade this thing from 96 all the way to 384 gigabytes of RAM. The Mac Pro? Sorry, it only goes up to 192.

And we're just in time for the new Cinebench 2024 benchmark, which—yes—this machine dominates.

I'm testing Adlink's Ampere Altra Developer Platform. This machine has a 96-core Arm CPU, but now they sell a 128-core version. Apple also recently released the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, so the model I'm testing isn't the "fastest in the world" like I could boast a couple months ago... but it's close, and I actually doubled my performance from last time—I'll show how later.

If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing:

I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine:

Sometimes life has a funny way of lining up opportunities, and one presented itself when Patrick from ServeTheHome reached out and said, "Jeff, I have an Ampere Altra Max server. You wanna come see it?"

Of course I did.

But seeing as Patrick is more than 800 miles away, I had to come up with a reason to go see it, so I pulled out my 6-node Raspberry Pi cluster—with it's 24 ARM Cortex A72 CPU cores—and decided to have a little competition.

And of course that competition is documented in a YouTube video: