2023-11-30 21:35:02
In recent years, the increase in the number of cores in processors is growing more and more rapidly. Indeed, the first processor with two cores is only around twenty years old (IBM’s POWER4 in 2001, from which the PowerPC G5 is derived)… and the new chip from Ampere Computing (specialized in ARM chips for servers) has just exceeded the current limit for the number of cores under Linux with ARM64 chips, which is 256 cores.
192 cores at Ampere.
Ampere’s new chip doesn’t hit that limit directly yet, as it contains 192 cores, but it can be used with a second CPU, bringing the total to 384. If you’ve used Macs there are more than Fifteen years ago, you may be familiar with this possibility: before the arrival of CPUs with multiple cores, the norm was to install several CPUs (two or four, generally). Apple has taken advantage of this solution for a long time, with some (very) old Power Macintoshes, then with the Power Mac G4, G5 and a few Mac Pros.
Coming back to Ampere Computing, the company had to propose a patch for the Linux kernel so that it can support 512 cores (8,192 with a specific option), an update which should be integrated into kernel 6.8 in early 2024. This value — already in place for x86 processors -64 — had been suggested in 2021, but the lack of chips capable of reaching more than 256 cores had prevented the change. Finally, this limit should not yet pose a problem for Apple: the current M2 Ultra chip has 24 cores, and a future M3 Ultra chip might contain 32.
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