Cavium Thunder X2 - What awesome tests?

I have a dual Cavium Thunder X2 system and I have been benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite as well as my own benchmarking.

What sort of benchmarks do you want to see? Using PTS for nginx, web server, postgres and memory benchmarks now.

It would be nice if I could just copy-paste and run commands. The current setup is 64gb ram and 2x28c / 4t per c so it’s a pretty interesting system for web services.

Under heavy load one of the disks would drop out but that’s resolved after firmware updates. Possibly because I’m using older 2tb disks (8x2tb).

I want ot test ZFS on Arm but that’s looking like it’ll have to be freebsd. Not sure how to get ZFS going easily on RHEL for arm…

Ubuntu for arm was… tricky… to get installed. I may need to give it another go with this updated firmware.

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is it possible to do some 3D graphics rendering benchmark?

  • ZFS on Arm on FreeBSD
  • FreeBSD make universe
  • FreeBSD poudriere run of the ports tree
    :smiley:

It would be kind of fun and interesting to see how Blender runs on that system. I know Blender runs on armv7 so I think it should run on the Cavium Thunder X2.

In my opinion the best test scene would be the Cycles “Class room” or “Production Benchmark”

As you have done it before I am sure you know how to run Blender in the terminal but as you asked

Download the test file, then from the directory with the .blend file run time blender -b benchmark.blend -o //render -a

In case that the render time is very short it might be interesting to try running from a ram-disk to speed up the loading time.

I am looking forward to seeing what that machine can do :slightly_smiling_face:. Wendell you are the best! :sunglasses:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/workflows/command_line.html


Sorry for editing the post so often but I had to correct a lot of stuff after double checking.

old post

download https://download.blender.org/demo/test/benchmark.zip , unzip and run blender -b benchmark.blend -o //render -f 2467 from the directory with the benchmark.blend file. Check the render output in the directory just in case something wonky goes on. (That is only one frame of the full benchmark *) The full, unchanged benchmark should work with time blender -b benchmark.blend -o //render -a

*Edit: hmmm … mabe the classroom scene would be better for more available comparison data but the “Production Benchmark” is a lot more realistic as a real world Film - Blender Scene. I let the benchmark run on my R5 1600 and I got a run time of 1h 7m 39s for that one frame.


Some time in the future I may pack a few astrophysics simulations into a self contained benchmark. I would be really interested in the results but I am not sure when I will get around to doing that.
Edit: In case I ever get around to it, what would be a good completion time to aim for (on what system) for a good benchmark?

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I’m curious what it’s specifically marketed for. I’ve only ever seen Cavium CPUs in Ubiquiti routers.

This thing is actually quite impressive.

Quite a bit more compute power than an Ubiquiti router :wink:

  • 64 cores in dual socket config
  • Frequency: 2.5GHz in nominal mode, 3GHz in turbo mode
  • 8 channels(?) of DDR4 up to 4TB total
  • up to 56 PCIe Gen3 lanes

I think it is mostly marketed for webserver and caching solutions. I could not find a lot of info on that.

https://www.cavium.com/product-thunderx2-arm-processors.html


Anandtech article:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12694/assessing-cavium-thunderx2-arm-server-reality

See how many amiga os emulators you can run before the system crashes and then when you have as many as possible make them all run Syndicate

It is a very useable server solution when you don´t need X86 (and even cheaper than AMD Epyc offerings).

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