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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#171

Post by antod »

tw04 wrote: post #122
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?

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.

> 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.

Yup, and their x86 backup plan (Netburst scaling all the way to 10GHz) was a dead end too.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#172

Post by rbanffy »

adrianN wrote: post #142
akulbe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main difference would be in that, since Windows has no native Unix environment, all these tools are added functionality while on the Mac, it overrides built-in functionality and can make things go a bit weird.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#173

Post by snaky »

kelp wrote: post #113

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…

> the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads

Sure, the cloud is a classical mainframe, and mainframes are famous for using specialized hardware for pretty much everything.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#174

Post by chroma »

gpderetta wrote: post #136
chroma wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the case. Only one of Skylake's decoders can translate complex x86 instructions. The other 4 are simple decoders, and can only transform a simple x86 instruction into a single µop. At most, Skylake's decoder can emit 5 µops per cycle.[1]

1. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/skylak...

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#175

Post by oblio »

greyskull wrote: post #149
PostOnce wrote: post #105

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…

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 opti…

If you have a simple business or website, AWS is not cost efficient compared to an old school shared hosting and it's not even more convenient. Those have slightly better control panels than the AWS Console and for crying out loud, AWS doesn't even offer automatic backups for their VMs as part of their offering.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#176

Post by pjc50 »

Solar19 wrote: post #70

Why ARM though? The article touts how this is a homegrown chip, and Amazon obviously has the resources to build a truly homegrown, optimized CPU. Why use ARM instead and import all of its idiosyncrasies? I guess I could ask the question more broadly. Why does every company that "designs its own chip" use ARM instead of designing its own ISA? How much work does it save? How much optimization does it forsake? I'm remin…

> How much work does it save?

Designing your own incompatible non-mainstream ISA basically commits you to maintaining your own compiler toolchain(s) and port of Linux distribution(s). That's dozens to hundreds of software engineers, continuously.

> How much optimization does it forsake?

Not a great deal, unless your workload is very unusual or you spend all your time running one algorithm.

It seems that what Amazon are doing is adding extensions or changes to facilitate hypervisors - not changes to the instruction set at all, but changes in the way system calls, hypervisor calls, and interrupts are handled.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#177

Post by fareesh »

How does competition work with regard to trade secrets like chip design etc? If I hire the top dogs at a chip maker and they design a similar chip for my company from memory, how is this prevented from happening?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#178

Post by yonkshi »

novaRom wrote: post #169

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…

I think we will also see proportionally more and more chips coming out of US companies as well.

When Google started their own chips (TPUs), they just kickstarted a vertical integration race amongst the tech giants. Apple, Intel, Nvidia were the old players, Google is dipping their toes in with TPU, now Amazon and probably soon Microsoft and FB.

I think overall we will see more chips from both Asia and US

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#179

Post by rbanffy »

DeathArrow wrote: post #168

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.

It looks they are after the uses where an Intel server-grade CPU is overkill. If an A72 solves my problem and is cheaper than the cheapest x86 I can get, A72 it'll be. ARM servers are very useful for low base loads.

If the demand gets higher, there is no reason not to spin up a couple x86's to take the load off the ARM boxes.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#180

Post by rjzzleep »

greyskull wrote: post #149
PostOnce wrote: post #105

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…

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 opti…

You can buy a 16-32 core machine with 64GB Ram for less than a hundred bucks on Hetzner. You can run SmartOS, proxmox, danubecloud or whatever other solution there, and for some of them you should be able to use terraform.

There is a little extra upfront cost to set these things up, but once you have it, it's fine. You can do your zfs snapshots to hetzners backup infrastructure.

A lot of people try to throw all their stuff on kubernetes, for that you can buy a few machines and provision them with ansible.

It's not like AWS devops engineers are the cheapest of all engineers, so there are a couple of solutions, which are mostly cheaper than their cloud alternatives.

Contrary to the parent I actually don't recommend going that route, mostly because I want to deliver a project and then have them be able to manage it on their own. E.g. an ECS cluster is simple to manage and maintain IMHO. I do tell them about the options that they have and them decide though.

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