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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#31

Post by monocasa »

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

Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#32

Post by cperciva »

imtringued wrote: post #12

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up. Ye…

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers?

Because if AWS is selling overpriced ARM servers, they're not selling overpriced Intel servers. I think it's safe to say that Intel has big profit margins on customized Xeons.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#33

Post by zapita »

monocasa wrote: post #31
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 find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?

Apple is also a TSMC customer I believe.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#34

Post by dang »

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…

Ok, we've taken out the word "homegrown" above.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#35

Post by monocasa »

jimbokun wrote: post #15
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…

It may not be "home grown", depending on how you want to define that term, but it does point to a vector for Intel's business model to be disrupted. Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it, and then going to TSMC or some other manufacturing specialist could steadily eat away at Intel's market share and margins. Apple has now gone this route, Amazon is testing the waters, and other tech giants probably aren't far behind…

> Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it

Just going to throw out there that Amazon paid more for Annapurna than Apple paid for P.A. Semi. That very well might imply that they have a custom uarch. Homegrown very well might be an apt adjective.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#36

Post by monocasa »

zapita wrote: post #33
monocasa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?

Apple is also a TSMC customer I believe.

So is AMD (they're shutting down GloFlo).

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#37

Post by clouddrover »

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.

Twitch (which is owned by Amazon) is rolling out VP9 video to their site for about a 25% bitrate saving over H.264. Since Twitch is almost entirely live video they needed a VP9 encoder fast enough to keep up at the quality they wanted. They found libvpx wasn't fast enough for their live video use case so they're using an FPGA VP9 encoder from NGCodec:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4HnM26Fwaw

https://ngcodec.com/news/2018/11/12/ngcodec-to-deliver-broad...

In a couple of years Twitch will start deploying AV1 streams. I imagine they'll take a similar approach for that as well.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#39

Post by craftyguy »

monocasa wrote: post #31
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 find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?

Yes.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#40

Post by clouddrover »

adamson wrote: post #6
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?

Video encoding is a good example. NGCodec makes FPGA based video encoders:

https://ngcodec.com/

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