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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#71

Post by stcredzero »

MBCook wrote: post #68
cbsmith wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care.

Plenty of compiled language users wouldn't need to care either.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#72

Post by ATsch »

monocasa wrote: post #36
zapita wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is also a TSMC customer I believe.

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

I'm not sure how they could shut down GloFo, considering they don't own it.

Besides, GloFo is still doing decently even if they've dropped 7nm... high-end isn't the whole chip market. And AMD is still using GloFo for non-7nm designs.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#73

Post by stcredzero »

n-gatedotcom wrote: post #69
stcredzero wrote: post #56

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. 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.

Back in about 1996, most of the profs were going on about how x86 would crumble under the weight of the ISA, and RISC was the future. One of my profs knew people at Intel, and talked of a roadmap they had for kicking butt for the next dozen years. Turns out, the road map was more or less right.

Is there more roadmap?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#74

Post by pcwalton »

Solar19 wrote: post #70

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 remin…

It's not just the ISA that you get when you license from ARM: it's the entire HDL source. If you go even further and get an architecture license, you also get a whole bunch of fundamental technical documents and a test suite. This saves a ton of time.

There's the issue of software compatibility. Writing a port of Linux—kernel and userland—is a ton of work. And if you have other chips on board, such as a GPU, the only drivers available may be ARM-only binary blobs. There might be an entire ecosystem of ARM software you have to keep supporting (which is one reason why Apple doesn't [yet] design their own ISA).

RISC-V has a small chance of commoditizing some of this stuff someday, but not yet.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#75

Post by uncoder0 »

jawnv6 wrote: post #67
comboy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accelera…

Only replying to the claim of disrespect. I think the disclaimer, as included, in a post positing a thesis is not disrespectful at all. gp clearly laid out that they were not an expert but had an assumption.

I will agree though that done without a disclaimer gp would have been disrespectful.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#76

Post by twtw »

Solar19 wrote: post #70

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 remin…

> how much work does it save?

Really a lot of work. Software compatibility and availability will make or break a processor. Unless you own the entire stack and are willing to deal with the struggles of a custom ISA, nobody wants to make a new one - the benefits probably aren't that great.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#77

Post by patrickg_zill »

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…

You're right however...

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Then

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"

Now

"Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS services"

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#78

Post by hermitdev »

stcredzero wrote: post #73
n-gatedotcom wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back in about 1996, most of the profs were going on about how x86 would crumble under the weight of the ISA, and RISC was the future. One of my profs knew people at Intel, and talked of a roadmap they had for kicking butt for the next dozen years. Turns out, the road map was more or less right. Is there more roadmap?

Intel chips are RISC under the hood these days (for a long while - decade or more). They're CISC at the ASM layer before the instructions are decoded and dispatched by the microcode.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#79

Post by stdplaceholder »

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.

I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but that’s about it.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#80

Post by electrograv »

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…

> It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips

As a strategic move, this makes a lot of sense for Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is a company known for excellence in a diverse set of disciplines, and TSMC has an excellent reputation for delivering state-of-the-art CPUs at scale — yet you are here to doubt they can pull it off, despite providing no evidence or rationale for your position?

The burden of proof is on you to justify your pessimism. If you have evidence for your claim that Amazon + TSMC will have problems scaling, please provide it.

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