[smspf]

ThunderX was a huge disappointment. ThunderX2 (which one may think is the successor of ThunderX, but is actually a completely different system that Cavium obtained by acquiring a different company that was also working on ARMv8 hardware) was a (not so huge) disappointment. Cavium tried to copy-paste lots of coprocessors and offload things from the CPU, but the overall system was not that great.

Early AMD Softiron and Applied Micro boards (which had 8 cores unlike the ThunderX which had 48 or 96) were actually faster, which I always found interesting.

But Ampere's previous generation (before N1) is fast, much faster than the ThunderX2. Afaik, they built it on top of previous Applied Micro IP. So I'd expect N1 to be in a different league and not worth comparing to ThunderX2.

[timthorn]

> But Ampere's previous generation (before N1) is fast, much faster than the ThunderX2.

I think you're getting ThunderX2 and ThunderX mixed up here.

[smspf]

In my experience, for tasks like everyday operation, kernel building etc.: Thunderx < ThunderX2 < eMAG (Ampere's platform before N1).

I wouldn't say it's the same order of magnitude for the 2 comparisons, but it's definitely noticeable.