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Choonho Son
Choonho Son

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Apple Silicon, State-of-the-art ARM CPU

My Macbook air has M2 CPU. I want to deploy my Cloudforet application in my Macbook. But we have only X86 docker image, because github does not support ARM linux runner for github action. There is a way for building X86 and ARM docker image in one command, but it takes too much time. Because it is a cross compilation for ARM image build in X86 machine.

Suddenly, I just want to know about ARM CPU.

Apple Silicon

CPU Version ARM Instruction Set Manufacturer Release Date
Apple M1 ARMv8.5-A (3.2 GHz) 5nm TSMC Nov. 2020
Apple M2 ARMv8.6-A (3.49 GHz) 5nm TSMC Jun. 2022
Apple M3 ARMv8.6-A (4.05 GHz) 3nm TSMC Oct. 2023
Apple M4 ARMv9.2-A 3nm TSMC May 2024

AWS

AWS provides Graviton instance

CPU Version ARM Instruction Set Manufacturer Release Date
Graviton ARMv8-A (2.3 GHz) 16nm TSMC Nov. 2018
Graviton2 ARMv8.2-A (2.5 GHz, Neoverse N1) 7nm TSMC Dec. 2019
Graviton3 ARMv8.4-A (2.6 GHz, Neoverse v1) 5nm TSMC May 2022
Graviton4 ARMv9.0-A (2.7 GHz, Neoverse v2) 4nm TSMC

In EC2 instances, 7 generation is Graviton3, 8 generation is Graviton4.
For example c7g.large is 2 vcores, 4GB memory Graviton3 CPU instance.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud also provides ARM VM.

CPU Version ARM Instruction Set Manufacturer Release Date
Ampere Altra ARMv8.2-A (3.0 GHz, Neoverse N1) 7nm TSMC July 2022
Axion ARMv9.0-A (Neoverse V2) TSMC Apr. 2024

Apple, State-of-the-art

From the ARM Instruction Set and Manufacturing technology, Apple adopts the latest technology in the world. The clock speed of Apple Silicon is unbelievable.

Is it real?

In MacOS, "sudo powermetrics" can see the System Information. From the log, CPU speed is adaptive on workload. In Apple Silicon, there are two type of CPUs. E-Cluster and P-Cluster. E means "efficiency" and P means "Performance".



**** Processor usage ****

E-Cluster HW active frequency: 999 MHz
CPU 0 frequency: 1113 MHz
CPU 1 frequency: 1079 MHz
CPU 2 frequency: 1082 MHz
CPU 3 frequency: 1132 MHz

P-Cluster HW active frequency: 711 MHz
CPU 4 frequency: 2249 MHz
CPU 5 frequency: 2137 MHz
CPU 6 frequency: 3058 MHz
CPU 7 frequency: 2624 MHz


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What is Neoverse?

Neoverse is an ARM CPU architecture for server-class for datacenter, edge-computing, and high-performance computing.

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Neoverse V2 CPU

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Who design custom ARM CPU?

AWS and Google has their own ARM CPU, Graviton, Ampere and Axion.

Annapururna Labs

Amazon acquires Annapururna Labs, an Israeli microelectronics company in January 2015. Annapururna Labs launched AWS Nitro hardware, Graviton, Trainium, and Inferentia.

Ampere Computing

Google Cloud and Azure uses Ampere Altra ARM CPU, which is designed by Ampere Computing LLC.

Ampere Computing is an American fabless semiconductor company founded in 2017. Renne James is CEO, ex-President of Intel.

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Google Silicon

Google also has their own Silicon design team, they launched Tensor Processing Units in 2015. Google's first ARM-based CPU is Axion

Intel's alien moved to ARM

Intel has been an indispensable company in CPU design, there were rumors that Intel CPUs were designed by aliens. Now that alien moved to ARM!

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Intel Corp Stock Market

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ARM Stock Market

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Develop in Macbook Apple Silicon, Launch ARM Kubernetes.

Top comments (2)

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jasonrandrews profile image
Jason Andrews

Very nice article, thank you for sharing the info about Arm. GitHub Actions runner for Arm is on the way. You can also read the GitHub blog.
Check out learn.arm.com for more how-to info.

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choonho profile image
Choonho Son

Great information for ARM support. I applied "Github Runner" for open source project. Thank you for information.