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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

121–130 of 359 posts

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#122

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?

There's just no way that's true. Their roadmap in 1996 was moving everyone to ia64/itanium. That was an unmitigated disaster and they were forced to license x64 from AMD.

If it weren't for their illegal activity (threats/bribes to partners) to stifle AMDs market penetration, the market would likely look very different today.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#123

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…

>> and what impact will it all have on our freedom to build cool shit?

Considering how much the cloud, and it's many services has improved our ability stuff, and will further improve it - i don't think that our ability to build cool stuff will be more limited than before the cloud. Quite the opposite.

But we'll need to pay more money to Amazon.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.

But that's trading lock-in to AWS for lock-in to Microsoft.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#125
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The t2.nano without unlimited burst credits relies on staying under a usage threshold. Why wireguard over something like sshuttle?

FYI, t3 instances have and option to either be throttld when you exceed your burst credit or just pay more for burst.

T2 offers this as well.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea that Intel is “RISC under the hood” is too simplistic.

Instructions get decoded and some end up looking like RISC instructions, but there is so much macro- and micro-op fusion going on, as well as reordering, etc, that it is nothing like a RISC machine.

(The whole argument is kind of pointless anyway.)

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am hoping DO will up the game in that. [1] I am not sure how big the market is for a only VM + DBaaS, because from my limited scope that is like 90% of what I need. The other 10% I am happy to have DNS, Transitional Emails, Register, CDN all under different companies to avoid putting all eggs in one basket. I do wish there is an UI to integrate all of it though. ( Yes I know that is exactly like Heroku, but I am cheap, Heroku is already much more expensive than AWS, I often wonder what if Heroku runs on top of DO )

[1] https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#130
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…

Apple sold 217 MILLION iPhones in just 2017 alone.

That's a number that doesn't include iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Macs - all of which have custom Apple silicon in them.

I think you're severely underestimating Apple here.

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