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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#141

Post by jusssi »

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…

> 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.

Until we get something more practical than RDP mouse slinger GUI for remote admin, I doubt serious people want to use Windows, even if it cost the same.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#142

Post by adrianN »

akulbe wrote: post #115
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'm not an expert, so forgive me if I'm way off base here… but isn't this exactly the need that homebrew fills?

That's similar to saying that Cygwin or MSYS or MinGW or WSL is filling that need on Windows.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#143

Post by Someone »

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.

Their lawyers likely strongly advised against bundling GPLv3 software with their OS because there is a non-zero risk that some judge, somewhere, some day, will claim that requires them to release the source of all their software under GPLv3.

I think that, if GPLv3 ever gets sufficiently tested in courts all around the world (which is highly unlikely) that stance could change.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#144

Post by gpderetta »

wtallis wrote: post #112
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.

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…

The fact is that a postdecode cache is desirable even on an high performance RISC design as even there skipping decode and fetch is desirable for both performance and power usage.

IBM Power9 for example has a predecode stage before L1.

You could say that, in general, riscs can get away without extra complexity for a longer time while x86 must implement it early (this is also true for example for memory speculation due to the more restrictive intel memory model, or optimized hardware TLB walkers), but in the end it can be an advantage for x86 (more mature implementation).

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#145

Post by ramijames »

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…

I help run a blockchain tech company (https://get-scatter.com/) who is creating an Oauth like stack that lets regular users access decentralized systems. A lot of the philosophy from FOSS is thriving in those communities and for the same reasons: the web has become incredibly centralized. For many people it is entirely limited to access via walled gardens of app stores and social platforms. For those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, we remember the web as a very different place and long for it. For those in the east, especially China, there is a very real problem of privacy and access which decentralized systems help alleviate.

I'm all for FOSS in every way. I wish more people were. We are collectively painting ourselves into a corner by allowing these enormous corporations access to every detail of our lives. Computing should make us more free, not less.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#146

Post by gpderetta »

n-gatedotcom wrote: post #102
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.

What is an example of a commonly used complex instruction that is "simplified"/DNE in RISC? (in asm, not binary)

Load-op instructions do not normally exist on RISC, but are common on CISC.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#147

Post by acqq »

The article is non technical. For those who search for that:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton...

"Semiconductor industry watcher David Schor shared SciMark and C-Ray benchmarks for the 16-core Graviton. In the SciMark testing, the AWS system-on-chip was twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on Linux 4.14."

http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI

""It does well on the Phoronix Test Suite," he said. "It does poorly benchmarking our website fully deployed on it: Nginx + PHP + MediaWiki, and everything else involved. This is your 'real world' test. All 16 cores can't match even 5 cores of our Xeon E5-2697 v4.""

"The system-on-chips use a mix of Arm's data-center-friendly Neoverse technology, and Annapurna's in-house designs. The 16 vCPU instances are arranged in four quad-core clusters with 2MB of shared L2 cache per cluster, and 32KB of L1 data cache, and 48KB of L1 instruction cache, per core. One vCPU maps to one physical core."

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#148

Post by tzakrajs »

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.

You would hate it too if you had to open source the entirety of your OS or application because a GPLv3 COPYING file was floating about in there.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#149

Post by greyskull »

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…

I started my professional career in AWS so I have zero experience in non-cloud businesses (i.e the vast majority of software jobs), but I always wonder about the cost argument people make against AWS (or any major cloud provider).

It's very easy to overspend, sure. But say we're considering how well you execute in terms of picking the right tools for your case and utilizing the right cost saving measures. In the optimal to average case, does AWS really lose out when considering the cost in human time to match against the feature set you get? e.g. Hardware and software maintenance, fault tolerance, scaling, compliance, security, integrations, etc.? I'm asking out of ignorance here.

I don't mean to say that every business needs a large feature set (the vast majority probably do not), but there's value in not having to do all of these things on your own. Or even having the freedom to go make an arbitrarily complex application, or expand what you already have, with relatively low barrier to entry.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#150

Post by aneutron »

They're ignoring the fact that it's not even the same ISA, not even the same use cases or maturity for these ISAs, and that for them to actually produce a x86 chip, the only way to do that is to licence either AMD or Intel as IIRC they're the only ones to hold the x86 patent.

That or change the way a majority of the software stack was written for the past 15 years.

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