> I think this is a misunderstanding on Jeff's part, or maybe he was given some bad marketing material.
It was more the former, though mostly miswritten... what was in my head and what I wrote at 11pm last night were two different things :) (I've just updated the post)
The point is, this machine was built at the request (IIRC) of an automotive manufacturer who was tired of the delay in running a suite of I believe hundreds of ECU tests. So needing to have a machine which could quickly compile the arm64 software, then run it in dozens of VMs to run their test suite. It was expensive in the cloud, and took much longer on a local workstation, so the Thelio Astra was born.
Ampere has a synthetic benchmark to kind of illustrate this point (though of course the benchmark is slanted completely in Ampere's favor, as Coremark is one of the few benchmarks where Ampere does better core-for-core than AMD/Intel): https://github.com/AmpereComputing/qemu-coremark?tab=readme-...
> This link is to a different CPU that is not quite as fast as the one he tested (though still fast) and only has 10Gbe, not 25Gbe. Still a good bargain, but not the same part used in the system.
That's a good point, again I had only checked late last night and thought it was the same M128-30, but alas, it's the 2.6 GHz version. To be honest, I'm not sure how to get the dual 25 GbE version of the board either, maybe ASRock Rack is only selling direct to partners. I will ask about whether it could be put into a bundle on NewEgg, I have no idea how they set up that arrangement, but IMO it should be available!
And having the CPU's easily purchasable without a motherboard bundle would be nice, too. They're probably not a high-volume item, but they have their place.
It was more the former, though mostly miswritten... what was in my head and what I wrote at 11pm last night were two different things :) (I've just updated the post)
The point is, this machine was built at the request (IIRC) of an automotive manufacturer who was tired of the delay in running a suite of I believe hundreds of ECU tests. So needing to have a machine which could quickly compile the arm64 software, then run it in dozens of VMs to run their test suite. It was expensive in the cloud, and took much longer on a local workstation, so the Thelio Astra was born.
Ampere has a synthetic benchmark to kind of illustrate this point (though of course the benchmark is slanted completely in Ampere's favor, as Coremark is one of the few benchmarks where Ampere does better core-for-core than AMD/Intel): https://github.com/AmpereComputing/qemu-coremark?tab=readme-...
> This link is to a different CPU that is not quite as fast as the one he tested (though still fast) and only has 10Gbe, not 25Gbe. Still a good bargain, but not the same part used in the system.
That's a good point, again I had only checked late last night and thought it was the same M128-30, but alas, it's the 2.6 GHz version. To be honest, I'm not sure how to get the dual 25 GbE version of the board either, maybe ASRock Rack is only selling direct to partners. I will ask about whether it could be put into a bundle on NewEgg, I have no idea how they set up that arrangement, but IMO it should be available!
And having the CPU's easily purchasable without a motherboard bundle would be nice, too. They're probably not a high-volume item, but they have their place.