Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#1

Post by zone411 » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:38 PM UTC

Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel
nytimes.com

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#2

Post by atonse » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:46 PM UTC

I wanted to try to use an AWS ARM server as a bastion host running Wireguard. But a t2.nano was cheaper.

Anyone get it working? (I haven’t tried)

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#3

Post by becauseiam » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:49 PM UTC

The article misses that months before the ARM announcement, AWS announced AMD based instances being available in m5 and r5 classes, and are cheaper than the default Intel offerings. If anything Intel might be afraid is that because the workloads that can be achieved are comparable.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#4

Post by comboy » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:53 PM UTC

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning.

I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#5

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company."

Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC.

I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree.

That said, the interesting thing about this article is that given Intel's margins, a company like Amazon feels they can take on the huge cost of integrating a CPU, support chips, and related components to achieve $/CPU-OP margins that are better than letting Intel or AMD eat all of that design and validation expense.

This sort of move by Amazon and AMD's move to aggressively price the EPYC server chips, really puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Intel.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#6

Post by adamson » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

comboy wrote: post #4

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning. I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

I'm pretty out of the loop here. Are there existing, widely used workloads that are critical for storage for which FPGAs are competitive with CPUs?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#7

Post by projektfu » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:06 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company." Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC. I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. That s…

I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#8

Post by 40acres » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:06 AM UTC

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!)

There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips, but if they display competency they'll certainly be able to squeeze more out of Intel.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#9

Post by muricula » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:07 AM UTC

comboy wrote: post #4

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning. I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

Not storage, networking: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#10

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:09 AM UTC

40acres wrote: post #8

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's ha…

But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them.

And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.