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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#111

Post by dokalanyi »

PostOnce wrote: post #105
maddyboo wrote: post #94

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom. For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to…

Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement. I think I'm not only doing them a service by avoiding lock-in to AWS specific "stuff", but also our industry and society at large by maintaining software diver…

What alternatives to AWS could save a non trivial amount of money? Especially for RDS? I think we're getting to the point where servers cost quite a bit

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#112

Post by wtallis »

earenndil wrote: post #97
hermitdev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CISC is still an asset rather than a liability, though, as it means you can fit more code into cache.

You can fit more code into the same sized cache, but you also need an extra cache layer for the decoded µops, and a much more complicated fetch/decode/dispatch part of the pipeline. It clearly works, at least for the high per-core power levels that Intel targets, but it's not obvious whether it saves transistors or improves performance compared to having an instruction set that accurately reflects the true execution resources, and just increasing the L1i$ size. Ultimately, only one of the strategies is viable when you're trying to maintain binary compatibility across dozens of microarchitecture generations.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#113

Post by kelp »

I'm by no means an expert in this, and maybe it's a bit obvious, but hadn't seen this mentioned yet.

I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs.

Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains.

The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads.

The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages.

I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads.

I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.)

If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal.

I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like.

It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#114

Post by chroma »

earenndil wrote: post #97
hermitdev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CISC is still an asset rather than a liability, though, as it means you can fit more code into cache.

I don't think that's an advantage these days. The bottleneck seems to be decoding instructions, and that's easier to parallelize if instructions are fixed width. Case in point: The big cores on Apple's A11 and A12 SoCs can decode 7 instructions per cycle. Intel's Skylake can do 5. Intel CPUs also have μop caches because decoding x86 is so expensive.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#115

Post by akulbe »

adrianN wrote: post #107
reikonomusha wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX. Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for. With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.

Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

I'm not an expert, so forgive me if I'm way off base here… but isn't this exactly the need that homebrew fills?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#116

Post by baybal2 »

maddyboo wrote: post #94

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom. For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to…

> They have very little incentive to interoperate with external organizations via open standards because they own many of the pieces which need to be interoperable. Thus, they can force users and developers to use their tooling, the applications they approve of, dictate what code will run on their platform, and how easily you can inspect, modify, or repair their products.

I myself is wondering why this is not yet the case.

Say, TSMC opening up a "privilege tier" only to those companies willing to make their chips with DRM to check executable signatures against their keys, and they will only be issuing signatures for non-insignificant amount of money.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#117

Post by Meai »

reikonomusha wrote: post #103
maddyboo wrote: post #94

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom. For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to…

For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX. Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for. With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.

You are speaking from inside the walled garden here, from the outside the effort of porting to macOS is monumental. The naive way is: I have to buy hardware, learn new Apple specific languages, learn a new OS, learn a new IDE, be compliant with their app store policies, distribution etc. (which applies to Windows now too I suppose).

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#118

Post by sanxiyn »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #110
adrianN wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

I dont understand this, they already share some of the source to several OS components. Do you care to elaborate a bit on this? Is there some GPL clause or something that became too risky for Apple or something? How do BSD projects get by with the newer licenses aside from already being open source it doesnt seem to affect their underlying license...

Allegedly, Apple hates GPLv3.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#120

Post by fhars »

basilgohar wrote: post #109
jawnv6 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And yet, here he/she gets exactly the result they were looking for. It's a well known online trope that you get your question answered faster and more thoroughly by posting a wrong answer first rather than plainly asking. My guess is it triggers something primal in us geeks. See: https://xkcd.com/386/

That trope is called Cunningham‘s law: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
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