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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#61

Post by justicezyx »

stcredzero wrote: post #57
Despegar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. 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 mone…

> AWS was Amazon monetizing its own infrastructure.

AWS builds infrastructure and monetize them.

AWS's hardware usage far exceeds what they need for their other businesses.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#62

Post by cbsmith »

stcredzero wrote: post #59
j1vms wrote: post #50

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.

Microsoft can compile everything on ARM if they want to. No reason why Azure would be completely stuck on Intel chips.

They can compile "everything" that Microsoft has written to ARM. There's a small matter of, you know, all the other stuff.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#63

Post by blackstrips »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #13
becauseiam wrote: post #3

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.

AMD are in a great place. TSMC's 7nm is in great shape (unlike Intel's 10nm), and AMD's multi-chip architecture allows them to get vastly better effective yields for high-core-count “chips”. They will be selling superior CPU to Intel's and they will be making them at significantly lower cost, while Intel is struggling to compete, stuck with monolithic chips on 14nm.

That said, Intel’s 14nm is very mature though. The yields are likely very good at this point given how long they have been using it. Knowing it inside out also likely allows them to squeeze a little more performance out of it.

A pity about their 10nm. Won’t be surprised if they have given up on it by now and have shifted all resources to 7nm. Hopefully 7nm comes online before 14nm completely gives out.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#64

Post by twtw »

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…

> Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee

Does Amazon really have an ARM architecture license? I thought these chips were using stock ARM cores (licensing cores only, not architecture).

I asked on HN on the original announcement and it sounded like that was the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553028

Also, I would argue that a custom ISA matters far less than a custom microarchitecture. After all, Intel is (mostly) using AMD's ISA.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#65

Post by bstx »

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…

ARM architectural licensees develop their own microarchitectures that implement the ARM ISA spec, they do not license any particular microarchitecture from ARM (e.g. Cortex-A? IP cores). That includes Apple, Samsung, Nvidia and others.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#66

Post by twtw »

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?

The only really useful distinction that can be made here is between companies that have architecture licenses, and therefore can design their own uarch, and companies with any other kind of arm license.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#67

Post by jawnv6 »

comboy wrote: post #14
adamson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm just guessing that if the only thing that given box is doing is handling very specific internal S3 API, you can probably optimize a few things over a multi-purpose architecture. I'm totally blue and I'll be honest - when I want to learn about something, it seems that stating some thesis gets me way more information from HN vs asking a question, especially when it turns out to be wrong ;)

This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that.

Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelerators for AES, and there's better ways to do that than mucking about with the ISA.

Do you get folks coming back for a second reply after this charade is made apparent?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#68

Post by MBCook »

cbsmith wrote: post #62
stcredzero wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft can compile everything on ARM if they want to. No reason why Azure would be completely stuck on Intel chips.

They can compile "everything" that Microsoft has written to ARM. There's a small matter of, you know, all the other stuff.

Make the server is cheaper and people will use them.

It already doesn’t matter for a lot of people. Java? PHP? JS? C#? If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care.

Outside of that costs rule the day. If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it.

Tons of open source software runs on Windows. Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. So those who could moved.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#69

Post by n-gatedotcom »

stcredzero wrote: post #56
Nokinside wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. So they had a particular advantage, and exploited the heck out of it, but now the potency of that advantage is largely gone?

I don't know what country you're in but in cricket there's a concept of innings and scoring runs. There's this dude who averaged nearly a 100 in every innings, most others average 50.

Now think of the situation as him scoring a few knots. Is he old and retiring? Or is this just a slump in form? Nobody knows!

I worked for a design team and we were proud of our material engineers.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#70

Post by Solar19 »

Why ARM though? The article touts how this is a homegrown chip, and Amazon obviously has the resources to build a truly homegrown, optimized CPU. Why use ARM instead and import all of its idiosyncrasies?

I guess I could ask the question more broadly. Why does every company that "designs its own chip" use ARM instead of designing its own ISA? How much work does it save? How much optimization does it forsake? I'm reminded of John Regehr's post on discovering the optimal instruction set: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669

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