Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#41

Post by Nokinside » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:56 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…

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all.

1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it.

2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process.

3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process.

As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#42

Post by andyidsinga » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 12:57 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…

its conceivable (even likely?) that they've developed some exotic peripherals that go along with the arm core in order to complete their asic ...which sort of gets them into the same ballpark of defining their own ISA.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#43

Post by dnautics » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

Nokinside wrote: post #41

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…

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own vari…

My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time to shrink.

^^ Note that this is entirely baseless speculation.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#44

Post by whynotminot » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:04 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…

Do you realize how many devices Apple sells a year? I think they've figured out the scale thing ok.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#45

Post by tptacek » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

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…

I'm not clear on why Intel should care that there are cheaper Scaleway cores available; presumably what they care about is whether they're the most cost-effective option at AWS. An at-scale existence proof that routinely running serverside ARM software is cheaper than running it on Intel chips is problematic for them.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#46

Post by beagle3 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

blihp wrote: post #21

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…

Because this is just their first generation of chips. Should Amazon stick with it, they will get better at it and costs will come down while performance goes up. This should scare Intel because they have been banking on the data center for future growth. This looks like pretty much their last stand for a place where they can maintain margins. They lost mobile very early on. More recently it's looking like PCs are at…

That might be the first generation under the Amazon brand, but my 3 year old Synology is using an Annapurna CPU; Amazon's chips are built the Annapurna (acquired by Amazon) team.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#47

Post by Nokinside » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #43

Nokinside wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own vari…

My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time…

Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. Intel brings in or buys design talent when needed, but their R&D in process technology is their strongest suit even today.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#48

Post by pcnix » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #43

Nokinside wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own vari…

My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time…

What you speculate is actually happening to some extent, Intel's designs work around their fabrication quirks in order to achieve their performance, and this makes Intel unable to easily separate out their fabrication business in order to take up external contracts, or unable to effectively change designs easily in order to use external fabricators.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#49

Post by kondro » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

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…

It's not the simplistic bare-metal services that are growing in AWS. It's all their serverless products where the end-user could care less what the underlying tech is running on so long as the API/performance is what they expect.

Amazon runs a very large number of fully managed load balances, S3/DynamoDB data servers, Lambda clouds, etc. More than 90% of their services are completely abstract the user away from the underlying architecture.

It doesn't matter what AWS charges for these services wholesale (and I believe they're currently providing same performance in EC2 at about a 40% cost saving over the Intel equivalent), the value is in the cost saving of them running their own services on this tech.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#50

Post by j1vms » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

Well, guess Intel's thinking "there's always Microsoft (Azure)."

I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.