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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#131

Post by ksec »

Designing an ARM Chip from ARM blueprint and TSMC is relatively simple and cheap for Amazon. And there is enough market and hype to justify the investment as they will probably break even within 24 months. It has become obvious that Intel isn't really willing to lower price that affect margin and sales. So Amazon needs to make a statement to Intel to say they have lots of options, EPYC and ARM.

I don't want to hype Zen 2 / EPYC 2, but I do think it will be very competitive. And that is a Threat to Intel. And fundamentally, the REAL threat is neither ARM, AMD or even RSIC-V, it is TSMC.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#132

Post by sjwright »

sanxiyn wrote: post #118
giancarlostoro wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it’s worth remembering: Linus Torvalds hates GPLv3 as well.

Meanwhile, updating gnu tools is pretty straightforward with homebrew, so the consequences of this view are minimal—for me, so far.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#133

Post by Oreb »

hermitdev wrote: post #78
stcredzero wrote: post #73

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.

Possibly stupid questions from someone completely ignorant about hardware:

If they didn’t care about backwards compatibility, would it be possible for them to release versions of their CPUs with _only_ the microcode layer? If yes, would a sufficiently good compiler be able to generate faster code for such a platform than for x86?

Alternatively, could Intel theoretically implement a new, non-x86 ASM layer that would decode down to better optimized microcode?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#134

Post by zumu »

projektfu wrote: post #7
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 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.

> it... is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel.

AWS is what is actively taking over data centers. If it were to start running on Amazon chips, the result may possibly the same.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#135

Post by sharpneli »

rblatz wrote: post #86
erikpukinskis wrote: post #85

Apologies in advance for the layperson question: It's my understanding that a lot of CPU gains come from caching. That suggests to me that there is potential performance to be gained by caching across a larger number of machines. Is that something Amazon could do here? Somehow connect all their machines and cache in a huge space? Maybe individual physical machines would be more like a front end for a cache space, and…

Cache is insanely fast, orders of magnitude faster than ram, and basically instant compared to going to disk or another machine on the network. I would find it unlikely that they could overcome the added network latency introduced in such a system. Edit: check this out for more info https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...

And to give the 1ns L1 access time some physicality. During 1 nanosecond light in vacuum travels 30 centimeters, or 12 inches. Signals in conductors travel slower. It is ridiculously short amount of time.

This means that there will absolutely never* be anything that can give faster access that is going to be farther than that from the CPU. Or more specifically half of that distance as the message to request what part of the cache to read must travel to the cache itself.

* Unless we find out FTL is possible. But it's a rather safe bet to assume no.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#136

Post by gpderetta »

chroma wrote: post #114
earenndil wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but intel CISC instructions can do more, so in the end is a wash.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#137

Post by ryacko »

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…

Performance competitive technology requires paying for its development. Electronics manufacturing is inherently heavy industry, nothing short of mandating FPGAs would tilt it any other way.

The world we live in is built upon a series of choices, the most important of which is whether you take a higher paying job or building what you desire.

There will always be a lag between the latest product, or in the case of Linux vs Unix, reverse engineering and developing a compatible product.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#138

Post by nickik »

To bad they are not doing this with RISC-V. Getting a large costumer and high performance implementations would been a great boost.

Since this is about vertical integration for them it would make a certain amount of sense.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#139

Post by cbsmith »

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…

So, if you are using an interpreted language, you're indifferent to cost savings enough that savings from running on ARM likely won't make enough to be a differentiator.

> If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it.

Yeah, I don't think the incentive is as large as you perceive it to be. Few, if any, customers are going to hire back the people they got rid of five years ago to port their old code over to a platform that is 50% cheaper to run, let alone smaller to no existent savings.

But that's kind of missing the simpler problem though: there's a reason beyond form factor that the ARM version of Windows has limited features/offerings...

> Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour.

Actually, with three year reserved instances, the pricing is largely the same in Azure.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#140

Post by Kliment »

bogomipz wrote: post #84
Nokinside wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>'They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it." What is a "node" in this context? I'm not familiar enough with FAB terminology.

A node is a combination of manufacturing capabilities and design components that are manufacturable in that process. They're typically named after an arbitrary dimension of a silicon feature, for example 14nm or 10nm. Your higher level design options are dictated by what you can produce at that "node" (with those masking methods/transistor pitches/sizes/electrical and thermal properties).
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