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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#201

Post by pjmlp »

dexen wrote: post #192
godelmachine wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infor…

MacOS being replaced by POSIX-based and Mach-based is an historical accident.

Had Steve Jobs been at somewhere else or Jean-Louis Gassée won his bid, and there wouldn't be a POSIX-based and Mach-based Mac OS X to talk about.

Linux is losing to MIT based OSes on embedded space, where OEM can have their cake and eat in what concerns FOSS.

If Android does get replaced by Fucshia you will see how much open source you will get effectively from mobile handsets OEMs.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#202

Post by cbsmith »

jusssi wrote: post #141
MBCook wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We crossed that threshold a very, very long time ago.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#203

Post by metildaa »

ATsch wrote: post #72
monocasa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is AMD (they're shutting down GloFlo).

I'm not sure how they could shut down GloFo, considering they don't own it. Besides, GloFo is still doing decently even if they've dropped 7nm... high-end isn't the whole chip market. And AMD is still using GloFo for non-7nm designs.

AMD's strategy of using multiple Zen 2 dies (7nm) tied together by a 14nm I/O die (since I/O doesn't scale down quite as well) is a really interesting strategy to improve yields using smaller dies (rather than making huge, low yield chips like the competition) & reduce mask/production cost. One 7nm Zen 2 mask can be used to produce CPU cores for a multitude of SKUs, optimizing for different markets using (cheaply customized) I/O interconnects made on 14nm.

This allows for AMD to keep much less silicon on hand for stocking the myriad of SKUs, as the only bottleneck for ramping up production of a SKU is producing those I/O interconnects on 14nm, which is a well understood process.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#204

Post by jholman »

oblio wrote: post #183
n-gatedotcom wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what country you're in but in cricket there's a concept of innings and scoring runs. There's this dude who averaged nearly a 100 in every innings, most others average 50. Now think of the situation as him scoring a few knots. Is he old and retiring? Or is this just a slump in form? Nobody knows! I worked for a design team and we were proud of our material engineers.

Your parallel is hard to follow for people who don't watch cricket. I have no idea how 100 or 50 "innings" relate to a few "knots". Are they like some sort of weird imperial measures? (furlongs vs fathoms?)

I suspect that "knots" was supposed to be "noughts", a.k.a zeros. That is, the last few times the 100-point batsman was at bat, he got struck out without scoring any points. Is he washed up?

I don't think it's a very useful analogy. :)

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#205

Post by godelmachine »

pjmlp wrote: post #201
dexen wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infor…

MacOS being replaced by POSIX-based and Mach-based is an historical accident. Had Steve Jobs been at somewhere else or Jean-Louis Gassée won his bid, and there wouldn't be a POSIX-based and Mach-based Mac OS X to talk about. Linux is losing to MIT based OSes on embedded space, where OEM can have their cake and eat in what concerns FOSS. If Android does get replaced by Fucshia you will see how much open source you wil…

>>If Android does get replaced by Fucshia you will see how much open source you will get effectively from mobile handsets OEMs.

Right now, only Apple has the knack to control OS version releases uniformly across all of its devices.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#206

Post by jeswin »

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.

> Google itself has admitted that Android itself is a mess by lieu of the fact that they open sourced it in the first place.

Can you provide a source for this claim?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#207

Post by nickik »

DeathArrow wrote: post #166
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.

Why would it be bad for RISC-V if a large company invest money and moves workloads to it?

Of course RISC-V is not as a far as ARM but if Amazon really had that strategy the ISA would hardly be their primary problem.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#208

Post by jabl »

daxfohl wrote: post #91
monocasa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're definitely using miracom lanai chips for part of it at least; google engineers are the maintainers of the lanai llvm backend.

Seems odd that MS and G are the ones using special hardware, but only reach to 24 and 16 gbps respectively, while AWS hits 100 gbps networking. Is AWS already using specialized HW as well?

I'd guess the bespoke hw is not necessarily faster signaling, but rather functionality. E.g. fast multipath routing in a Clos fabric, firewalling, maybe offloading some specific workload (IIRC ms was using fpgas to offload some aspect of search for Bing)

Going back to signaling, AFAIU the state of the art is 25 Gb/s per lane, 100 Gb networking aggregates 4 of those. 50 Gb/s is still in the labs.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#209

Post by kingosticks »

comboy wrote: post #20
muricula wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not storage, networking: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

Indeed, with networking it seems to have already happened, if I remember correctly Google also uses software defined networking based on their own hardware (not sure if FPGAs are involved)

Google, along with everyone else, still uses ASIC-based networking hardware from the traditional vendors where they need the bandwidth. But full marks to their PR department for the idea they have it all solved themselves.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#210

Post by kingosticks »

jabl wrote: post #208
daxfohl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems odd that MS and G are the ones using special hardware, but only reach to 24 and 16 gbps respectively, while AWS hits 100 gbps networking. Is AWS already using specialized HW as well?

I'd guess the bespoke hw is not necessarily faster signaling, but rather functionality. E.g. fast multipath routing in a Clos fabric, firewalling, maybe offloading some specific workload (IIRC ms was using fpgas to offload some aspect of search for Bing) Going back to signaling, AFAIU the state of the art is 25 Gb/s per lane, 100 Gb networking aggregates 4 of those. 50 Gb/s is still in the labs.

56Gbps serdes lanes are being used in network chips right now.
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