Bought an Ampere Altra System

In the hunt for a development machine, I got to the next phase. I did some shopping, and there it is: my own Ampere Altra-based system. Why? As you may have read in my previous post, I used several AArch64 systems for local development. And the latest one, an Apple MacBook Pro, is nice and fast but has some limits — does not support 64k page size. Which I need for my work. Let’s go cheap So I have decided to buy myself an Ampere Altra system. As cheap as possible. AArch64 server parts The only part I needed to buy brand new was a motherboard. And the only “affordable” one was AsrockRack ALTRA8BUD-1L2T, which was a product for data centres (so I was told). Next, a used processor. At first, the idea was to buy a Q64-22 (64 cores, 2.2 GHz clock), but when the seller on eBay was not responding, one of my friends decided to upgrade his Altra systems and offered me a Q80-30 (80 cores, 3.0 GHz clock). The CPU requires cooling. There are not many options for the LGA 4926 socket. I found an Arctic Freezer 4U-M in one of the online stores here in Poland and bought the only one they had. Each computer needs memory, right? So I went with used ones again, as there is a huge market for used server parts. I bought eight sticks of 16GB each; the model is SK-Hynix HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN. It is not present on the official Ampere Altra memory Approved Vendor List. Working fine (after re-seating three sticks): DRAM populated DIMMs: SK0 MC0 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC1 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC2 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC3 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC4 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC5 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC6 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN SK0 MC7 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN Ordinary parts The rest of the parts are ordinary ones available in any random store. Computer case The case was a challenge. The ALTRAD8UD-1L2T is a “deep MicroATX” case which means I needed a case that can take an EATX motherboard (they are a bit deeper than ATX). I looked through pictures in online stores and selected about 10 candidates. Then I started watching reviews and crossed several of them out. Usually because the holes for handling cables were too close to the edge of a board. Finally, bought an Endorfy 700 Air case. It came with five 120mm fans (3 at the front, one at the rear, and one on the top). There was a lot of space behind the motherboard’s plate for cabling, and a fan splitter so I could connect all five case fans as one to the motherboard. And the PSU compartment has an extra hole for PCIe power cables! Power supply The ALTRAD8UD-1L2T motherboard is expected to be powered by a 12V PSU only. There is no connection port for the ATX 24-pin plug. Instead, there is an adapter that takes only power-on and power-good signals from it and connects to the small 4-pin port on the motherboard. There are three EPS12V connectors available. I used two of them. The MSI MPG A850G power supply I bought comes with two such cables and has an option for connecting the third one. The rest What else is needed? Some NVME for storage (Lexar LM790 2TB) and a random graphics card (Radeon Pro WX2100, remembering the old times). And I was ready to build the system. How does it look? The motherboard feels small once the CPU cooler is mounted. And a low-profile graphics card is almost invisible: Inside view The back side of the case shows where I hid the ATX 24-pin adapter and most of the cables. Back side with cabling Price Of course, if I went cheap, then how cheap did it end up being? Component Price in PLN motherboard 4 068 CPU 1 341 CPU cooler 191 memory 696 case 395 power supply 529 NVME 522 In total: 7 732 PLN (around 1 800 EUR). About 500 EUR more than I anticipated at first. The CPU upgrade to 80 cores was extra 100 EUR. Memory came from another seller, as the first one ended their sale before I was ready to buy, resulting in an extra 40 EUR to the cost. At first, I wanted to have 2GB per core, but with the CPU upgrade, I would have needed to go to 256 GB, and that would have been another 250-300 EUR extra. The case had a 30% discount due to a promotion, and the NVME came with 7% cashback. Plans My current plans for this system are: install Fedora 42 create some VM instances: RHEL 9/10 CentOS Stream 9/10 instances: put a Radeon RX 6700XT inside and check whether it would work inside and check whether it would work try to use it as a desktop do some crazy experiments All Linux systems will have both 4k and 64k page size kernels.