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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#211

Post by metildaa »

simonh wrote: post #185
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…

All of what you say is true and I completely agree it's important to have open solutions out there. What vertical solutions offer though is accountability. If there is a security issue in the iPhone everybody knows who owns the problem. If there are scammy apps in the iOS App Store - and there actually are - everyone knows who has the power and responsibility to clean that up.

Open source isn't a solution to the problem you bring up, proper maintenance processes are.

A great example of this is the Debian package archive, with 51,000 packages in the archive, you know each package has a maintainer that has vetted that package, and they will maintain it for the rest of the release (usually 2 or 3 years) even if the developers of it wander off or disappear.

Key to this is the Debian Social Contract, which defines what is acceptable, and when maintainers should start ripping out malicious anti-features or reject malicious updates from the upstream project: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

Comparatively, PyPI & npm are unmaintained dumping grounds of sketchy software, like copying code sight unseen off StackOverflow, but with the added risk of every update potentially being malicious.

The lack of separate, objective maintainers for these package archives has caused a plethora of issues, from packages randomly disappearing, anti-features being added, to malicious code being embedded. This is a cultural issue around managing packages that the Free Software world mostly solved decades ago, yet Open Source communities like nodejs can't figure out these basic processes that prevent bad shit from happening to packages in their archive.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#212

Post by jabl »

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…

Aarch64 (does this chip even bother supporting 32-bit?) is much less idiosyncratic than the older 32-bit arm. Also, arm server platform has UEFI (for all its faults), providing a x86 like plug and play experience. And, like others already said, they are getting an entire ecosystem as part of the deal.

Risc-v might get there one day, but not yet.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#213

Post by tasubotadas »

m_mueller wrote: post #161
snaky wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Installing kunernetes is something you can only suggest if you haven't done yourself. Getting it right is extremely non trivial

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#214

Post by mjlee »

ori_b wrote: post #157
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

> Especially for RDS? Run your own servers, instead of paying Amazon to do your system administration. At small sizes, Amazon is a cheap sysadmin. At scale, paying them as sysadmins is expensive.

Even at quite large sizes, RDS is a fantastic product. I think I'd opt to use it even with full time Database Administrators on staff.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#215

Post by jacobush »

metildaa wrote: post #211
simonh wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of what you say is true and I completely agree it's important to have open solutions out there. What vertical solutions offer though is accountability. If there is a security issue in the iPhone everybody knows who owns the problem. If there are scammy apps in the iOS App Store - and there actually are - everyone knows who has the power and responsibility to clean that up.

Open source isn't a solution to the problem you bring up, proper maintenance processes are. A great example of this is the Debian package archive, with 51,000 packages in the archive, you know each package has a maintainer that has vetted that package, and they will maintain it for the rest of the release (usually 2 or 3 years) even if the developers of it wander off or disappear. Key to this is the Debian Social Con…

I agree with the specific examples and symptoms you cite, and yet I can't really see the dividing line being Open Source vs Free Software.

Say, OpenBSD is thoroughly vetted and ("soft, permissive") Open Source. They also have a social contract. (Perhaps not in writing as much as in culture, I am not very familiar with the BSDs either technically or socially but I know the software is very well vetted and accounted for.) Or maybe I misunderstood the distinction you make.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#216

Post by rbanffy »

rocqua wrote: post #184
rbanffy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the optimizations going on, high performance RISC designs don't look like RISC designs anymore either. The ISA has very little to do with whatever the execution units actually see or execute.

It is baffling to me that byte-code is essentially a 'high level language' these days.

And yet, when I first approached C, it was considered a "high level" language.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#217

Post by sametmax »

simonh wrote: post #185
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…

All of what you say is true and I completely agree it's important to have open solutions out there. What vertical solutions offer though is accountability. If there is a security issue in the iPhone everybody knows who owns the problem. If there are scammy apps in the iOS App Store - and there actually are - everyone knows who has the power and responsibility to clean that up.

And how did that work out ? Apple is still doing whatever they want, shut down competition and steal ideas, but never pays any consequences for their mistakes.

So how is that any good for us ?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#218

Post by karakanb »

Truly lame question, is there any possibility for Amazon or other cloud providers to monitor the executed instructions and their distribution? Could this allow more optimized architectures for specific loads, or would this not bring any actual benefit?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#219

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Amazon is not the only game in town. They are competing not on cost but on feature set. However, for them running their own chips is mainly a way to optimize cost. Open source hardware is going to be a key enabler for them. Right now both Apple and Amazon are still using arm based processors, which are not open sourced but very common. The whole point of that is that it allows them to leverage open source compiler tool chains, open source kernels, etc. Replicating that stuff internally as a proprietary me-too style implementation is stupendously expensive. Neither Amazon nor Apple do that.

Instead they roll their own chips optimized for their own use case. As open source chipsets based on e.g. risc-v become more popular, tool support for that will become more popular and it will become a natural choice for building custom hardware. Breaking apart the near monopoly that Intel has had on this since the nineteen seventies is a good thing IMHO. Having a not so benevolent dictator (Intel) that has arguably been asleep at the wheel for a while now is slowing everybody down. This is what is driving people to do their own chips: they think they can do better.

The flip side is that companies building their own custom chipsets need to maintain interoperability. If they diverge too much from what the rest of the world is doing, they risk isolating themselves at great cost because it makes integrating upstream changes harder and it requires modifying standard tool chains and maintaining those modifications. Creating your own chip is one thing. Forking, e.g. llvm or the linux kernel is another thing. You need some damn good reasons to do that and opt out of all the work others are doing continually on that. Some people do of course (e.g. Google forked the linux kernel a few years back) but it buys them a lot of hassle mostly and not a whole lot of differentiation. They seem to be gradually trying to get back to running main line kernels now.

If Amazon, Apple, MS, Google, Nvidia, etc. each start doing their own chip designs, they'll either create a lot of work for themselves reinventing a lot of wheels or they get smart about collaborating on designs, code, and standardized tool chains. My guess is the latter is already happening and is exactly what enables this to begin with. Standard tool chains, open chip designs, an open market of chip manufacturers, etc. are what is enabling this. Embedded development was locked up in completely proprietary tool and hardware stacks for decades. That is now changing. You are describing the past few decades not the future.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#220

Post by gpderetta »

antod wrote: post #171
tw04 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but their plan C (revive the pentium III architecture) worked perfectly.

We will have to see if they have plan C now(plan B being yet another iteration of the lake architecture with little changes).

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