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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#191

Post by zaarn »

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…

AWS has a few pain points in the cost department; especially Traffic is insanely expensive compared to other providers. Hetzner costs about 1$ per TB of Traffic. EC2 costs 88$ for that amount of outgoing data, Cloudfront 80$, etc. That's not even accounting that Hetzner doesn't bill incoming and internal traffic, which AWS does.

There is no way that the little work I need to put up a network on a Hetzner host is worth 80$ the Terabyte of Traffic.

I have a regular Traffic usage of between 800GB and 1.4TB each month, AWS would easily double my monthly bill on that single item alone.

When you need a lot of CPU and RAM, AWS starts to get very expensive too, I have 128GB of RAM with 12 vCPUs and 2TB storage for about 55$/m, AWS has no comparative offering at even the remotely same price. That is even including the hours I have to spend sysadmin'ing this specific box.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#192

Post by dexen »

godelmachine wrote: post #186
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…

The thing you are trying to speak in favor of is Android. Google itself has admitted that Android itself is a mess by lieu of the fact that they open sourced it in the first place. Good thing Apple kept everything proprietary. There’s at least one Technology Stack I can place my trust on.

The thing you are trying to speak in favor of is Apple Macintosh, with its proprietary OS long since replaced by POSIX-based and Mach-based MacOS X.

We had beautiful gaming consoles, beautiful Macintoshes, and IBM mainframes, and beautiful Burroughs and Symbolics' Lisp Machines, and the Commodore C=64s.

And yet here we are, the open ecosystem has won again, as it naturally does, based on the costs structure and information propagation.

The consoles are PCs now. The mainframe of yesteryear is now a datacenter built from souped-up PCs. The mobile phones, at first dominated by proprietary OSes, are tilting ever more towards desktop-grade OSes. And the C=64s are dead and the demoscene is delivering the eulogy.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#193

Post by wmf »

fareesh wrote: post #177

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?

There are patents and non-competes in some states but basically nothing prevents it. Silicon Valley exists because of the cycle of engineers leaving established companies to start startups (or now, leaving established companies to go to companies that are branching out into every area possible).

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#194

Post by kingosticks »

rbanffy wrote: post #160
Kliment wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Would a pixel be a good analogy? It's the smallest thing you can make on your chip and that defines all the rest of your design.

Only in the same way that even pixels of the same physical size can have other vastly different properties. And that makes ranking them purely on their size totally misguided. So I'm not convinced that really helps.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#195

Post by reikonomusha »

Meai wrote: post #117
reikonomusha wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX. Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for. With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.

You are speaking from inside the walled garden here, from the outside the effort of porting to macOS is monumental. The naive way is: I have to buy hardware, learn new Apple specific languages, learn a new OS, learn a new IDE, be compliant with their app store policies, distribution etc. (which applies to Windows now too I suppose).

I suppose I’m an outlier then. I just use normal UNIX tools. No Xcode, no IDE’s, no proprietary toolchains. Maybe my programs are too boring. :)

There are some portability quirks for sure, though.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#196

Post by DavidNielsen »

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…

In fairness to Apple they are these days quite the Open Source company. Their main language is fully open source in every sense the word. You can get large parts of their base OS under an acceptable license as well as their stack, much of which is developed in the open or work is open sourced as Apple is able to. Of course they will keep back OSS code if it means making a big splash at a presentation but I don’t think that is a bad thing as such, who would deny them a bit of theatre.

They also do a lot of tech blogging on their Open source code, especially the Safari and WebKit team have some excellent posts regularly.

Sure they have proprietary magic in there but it is not as big a part of the pie as people imagine, and certainly less than in years past.

The same is true for Microsoft, who now famously aims to be the biggest Open Source company in the world (having acquired GitHub, Xamarin and many others, as well as made partners and friends out of enemies of the past, to help them on that journey).

In fact I can’t think of a single major company in the business which hasn’t embraced Open Source to some degree. I don’t think that the Apple strategy of controlling the entire experience means what it used to anymore. It doesn’t mean locking you in to just one way of doing things, we now know that we need the compiler, tools and stack to be available and truly free, as a bare minimum for this to work and experience shows that the more work we share, in general, the better an experience we can present to users and developer.

Open Source has won, all these companies taking on designing their own chips, datacenters, OSes, languages and so on, they would not be possible without that commonly shared mass of work.

Famously FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard, until someone threatened to sue them for damages to the tunes of X times infinity, which is a fairly large dollar amount for any given value of X.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#197

Post by jononor »

rbanffy wrote: post #170
jononor wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would GPLv3 be substantially different risk than GPLv2?

GPLv3 has anti-TiVoization and patent protection built in.

Yes, but that doesn't make it more likely that anyone would have to open source their apps or OS?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#198

Post by rvp-x »

DavidNielsen wrote: post #196
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…

In fairness to Apple they are these days quite the Open Source company. Their main language is fully open source in every sense the word. You can get large parts of their base OS under an acceptable license as well as their stack, much of which is developed in the open or work is open sourced as Apple is able to . Of course they will keep back OSS code if it means making a big splash at a presentation but I don’t thi…

Neither of those are open companies. Stop listening to their marketing departments.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#200

Post by teekert »

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…

The positive view would be that the market always has enough demand for open source software and open hardware because as you say it would make it impossibly hard to start as a new small player in a closed, controlled market and the would kill innovation. The coming year will be important and interesting in this regard.
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