I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
81–90 of 214 posts
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are E5 Skylakes available exclusively to Google? Can't find E5 v5 on Intel's site: http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors .
Purley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and higher so Google must have early access to it. Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets.. Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.
E3 is not a server SKU, it's meant for workstations and it's more similar to i7 than E5. It lacks various features including ECC RAM which, I suppose, is a no-starter for cloud hosting. Also some virtualization capabilities are missing, notably accelerated interrupt injection (APICv+posted interrupts).
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#83I wonder if Skylake would offer a material improvement for our workload. We don't necessarily use AVX-512, but we do use a heck of a lot of CPU resources on the current architecture. We are a python/elixir shop.
Great job GCP team!
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please relay back to your team that the moment you get Postgres for your Cloud SQL product you'll get a lot of AWS converts.
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?
Spending on GCP is more predictable than on AWS. Also the general behavior is more predictable. For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources.
I believe that whatever GCP does, does better. Faster network, faster spinning and turning off servers, simpler quotas, etc. GCP doesn't offer that many services as AWS and most of those are not very compatible with Apache tools (although they're doing their best, e.g. BigTable looks like Hbase from outside).
In our case, we're running ~28,000 servers on GCE and utilizing many services, especially PubSub, BigQuery, etc. The price we're paying for our setup is roughly 1/4 of a similar setup on AWS.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#85I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
No matter how ignorant someone else may be, it's never okay on HN to use uncivil language like this. Your comment stands just fine without it.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#86I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
> I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about.
Man, if you had said this along with your previous comment, we wouldn't be having this argument. Remember, this is the internet, where everyone is a self-made expert. I guess that I've grown accustomed to the "guilty until proven innocent" approach.
So you are saying that AMD doesn't verify its designs in-house? Is your information recent, or has it been some time since you worked there? Because I looked up verification jobs after I read your other comment, and it seems like they are actively hiring testing and verification engineers.
> You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
Nah, I'm typing on my keyboard.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, there's precedent. Though that was the FPUs in Intel processors, not AMD. So it's not very good precedent.
Intel's FDIV bug was an outlier. Besides, nowadays most of the ISA is implemented in microcode[1]. There are two advantages to this approach: 1) it is much easier to verify the microcode unit (it's simpler/smaller), and 2) it allows CPU vendors to "fix" ISA implementation issues post-release by issuing microcode updates. [1]: ISA => microcode is equivalent in some respects to C => LLVM IR
Most of the ISA may be implemented in microcode, but the parts that matter are certainly not microcoded!
For example the TLB access and the fast path of the TLB miss are not microcoded. You only get to microcode if you have to set an accessed bit or a dirty bit, or if there is a page fault.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and higher so Google must have early access to it. Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets.. Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.
E3 is not a server SKU, it's meant for workstations and it's more similar to i7 than E5. It lacks various features including ECC RAM which, I suppose, is a no-starter for cloud hosting. Also some virtualization capabilities are missing, notably accelerated interrupt injection (APICv+posted interrupts).
E3 does support ECC RAM.
I'm running a Haswell Xeon E3-1225 with 16GB ECC RAM as my workstation.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)
FWIW, that's not the only good stuff on GCE: * Instances have sustained use discounts - you don't need to pay in advance and reserve them and the discounts are applied very, very fairly. * Pre-emptable instances are cheap as all hell, and they are perfect for batchwork, celery workers, etc (anything disposable). You don't have to bid for them so automation is easier. * Up to 2 Gbits/second/core, depending on your wor…
Heh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it?
It's superior for running Windows at least, right?
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#90Hahaha. Meanwhile I've been running 2 machines with Skylake and a combined 24 cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 6x512G SSDs, unmetered 1Gbit/s public and 2,5Gbit/s internal for over half a year for a combined $150 total, in complete privacy and in full control of my hosts.. go dedicated, people.