Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#161

Post by m_mueller » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

snaky wrote: post #151

dokalanyi wrote: post #111

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

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme Substract VAT from the price, add HDD for WAL, and setup PostgreSQL on a couple of them.

Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Install Kubernetes and make your own cloud. It really depends on your workload whether that's better than managed cloud services with elastic scaling:

* your software has a startup time that takes too long - cannot scale down easily

* you have a constant base load with only moderate peaks

* you'd rather run other background tasks at times with low load than scaling down - this way you get a bunch of "free" compute power you can use for other things

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#162

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

Brybry wrote: post #96

product50 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Intel supporters always say till the time everyone builds those chips and there is no market left for Intel at all. It is just so sad that Intel, which had such a ferocious lead and was on the cutting edge of processor design/manufacturing, is now dying from a thousand cuts. Just look at the industry - everyone who is a major player in cloud, AI, or mobile (Apple, Huawei, & Samsung) are now in the chip b…

How is Intel dying? Losing a near monopoly is a far cry from dying. And Amazon's Graviton/armv8 chips aren't going to be competitive for many workloads. If you look up benchmarks you'll see they generally aren't competitive in terms of performance[1]. They'll only be competitive in terms of cost (and, generally, not even performance/cost). I'm personally pleased that there is more competition but I find that saying I…

And it sure doesn't help that Amazon won't be selling desktop PCs or on-prem servers anytime soon.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#163

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #154

ryacko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Linu…

> nothing short of mandating FPGAs would tilt it any other way. I can think of multiple alternatives that could be taken in isolation or combined. - Regulating the market and splitting foundries from their IP developers (this may not even be necessary at this point) - Funding development of a rich set of public-domain IP that could be used to build a common standard platform - Direct all government purchases to be of…

US government (and other major purchaser) "second sourcing" regulations are a longstanding attempt to keep a competitive market in situations where it would otherwise collapse into a monopoly. That's how Intel came to share x86 with AMD in the first place.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#164

Post by DeathArrow » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

plinkplonk wrote: post #100

(Tangential) What I'd really like to see is a competitor to Google's TPU that I can actually buy (vs rent on the cloud)

Check here: https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100...

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#165

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

mijamo wrote: post #158

rbanffy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google cloud solutions are very competitive in price with the AWS ones.

The lock in is the same though. We are having A LOT of troubles due to lock in with Google Cloud (particularly GAE and Datastore, but also Pub/Sub) and it is really not fun at all...

You can always design around that. I know I'm mostly locked in when I deploy a classic GAE application or when I use the datastore (there is AppScale, if you need).

If what you are running is a virtualized version of your physical DC infrastructure, you can probably deploy it anywhere with very little trouble.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#166

Post by DeathArrow » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

nickik wrote: post #138

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.

Bad for RISC-V, good for Amazon. RISC-V is in a far less usable state than ARM ISA.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#167

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #163

rbanffy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nothing short of mandating FPGAs would tilt it any other way. I can think of multiple alternatives that could be taken in isolation or combined. - Regulating the market and splitting foundries from their IP developers (this may not even be necessary at this point) - Funding development of a rich set of public-domain IP that could be used to build a common standard platform - Direct all government purchases to be of…

US government (and other major purchaser) "second sourcing" regulations are a longstanding attempt to keep a competitive market in situations where it would otherwise collapse into a monopoly. That's how Intel came to share x86 with AMD in the first place.

Yes, but I'm not sure it's still as influential as it was in the 80's and 90's

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#168

Post by DeathArrow » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

It's not exactly a threat. Amazon use cortex A72 in their CPUs and there's no way they can replace most Intel CPUs with that. The performance isn't there.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#169

Post by novaRom » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

In the near future we will see more and more chips coming from Asia. Not just final silicon production, test, and packaging, but also complete hardware design. They will produce GPUs, FPGAs, and CPUs of all classes.

Look how many students in Computer Design, Digital Design, Electrical Engineering graduate every single year. Multiply that by low costs with high productivity and you will find Silicon Valley will face a very strong competitor.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#170

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

jononor wrote: post #155

Someone wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would GPLv3 be substantially different risk than GPLv2?

GPLv3 has anti-TiVoization and patent protection built in.