51–60 of 359 posts
There are three chips that work well in the data center: EPYC, Xeon, and POWER. All of these are billion dollar designs. Nothing about the ARM ecosystem supports designing to these same constraints or spending that amount of money to enter this space seriously.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Just look at the industry - everyone who is a major player in cloud, AI, or mobile (Apple, Huawei, & Samsung) are now in the chip business themselves. How will Intel grow? And where would this so called scale advantage come in?
Wake up and smell the coffee.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So they had a particular advantage, and exploited the heck out of it, but now the potency of that advantage is largely gone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain. The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party servic…
AWS was Amazon monetizing its own infrastructure. Maybe they're thinking of monetizing AWS's infrastructure? Instead of being in the gold rush, sell the pickaxes and backpacks in a general store. Then, when people realize there's a lot of money in those stores, start selling store shelves and offer wholesale logistics.
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.
Pretty funny to see “Dave Patterson” described as “a Google chip specialist”!