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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

221–230 of 359 posts

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#221

The article misses that months before the ARM announcement, AWS announced AMD based instances being available in m5 and r5 classes, and are cheaper than the default Intel offerings. If anything Intel might be afraid is that because the workloads that can be achieved are comparable.

Ye, I feel the NYT article is a bit off, specially when consulting other article about the same https://www.extremetech.com/computing/281338-amazon-launches...

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#222
This is oversimplification.

Binary compatibility, of millions of third party libraries out there, is the biggest hurdle.

How many years did it take to switch from Python 2.7 to Python 3 ?

AWS lockin is a bigger threat.

I prefer to keep my binaries cloud agnostic and X86 and X64 compatible rather than AWS only code or even ARM binary.

By the way what happened to Amazon phones ?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#223

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…

It means that it's time to break down those companies with antitrust laws. Apple, Google and Amazon should be broken to many separate companies.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#224

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…

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…

>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.

so what do you recommend instead of Amazon?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allegedly, Apple hates GPLv3.

And it’s worth remembering: Linus Torvalds hates GPLv3 as well. Meanwhile, updating gnu tools is pretty straightforward with homebrew, so the consequences of this view are minimal—for me, so far.

Linus Torvalds has in multiple talks said that he does not hate gplv3. He thinks limiting DRM (tivo case) in the license is something he do not want for the kernel, and he strongly disliked the method where GPLv2 automatically upgrades to GPLv3 with the "or any newer version", since his view is that GPLv3 and GPLv2 is two very different licenses because of the DRM clause. During the debconf talk, he said that describing gplv3 as being similar to gplv2 was immoral.

Here is a direct quote "I actually think version 3 is a fine license" - Linus Torvalds

FSF view DRM as just being a physical version of a legal restriction, and they often quote laws that makes it illegal to bypass DRM as proof that DRM is also a legal restriction. Thus in GPLv3 they treat them as identical and they don't see it as a change in how the GPL license work. Linus strongly disagree on this.

This is very different from the Apple case and I doubt anyone can find similar quotes from them.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#227
post #185

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.

In my experience, if a company owns the entire supply chain then they are usually a (semi-)monopoly and don't care much about actual the problems you have, unless they also affect a large percentage of their customer base.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#228
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wort…

This is great, how about adding reliability, availability, redundancy, SLA's and a few things more. How about needing to have a data warehouse, load balancers, SOC compliance? Not all the businesses go for the cheapest option and these decisions are rarely single dimensional. AWS is an integrated solutions for every aspects of an enterprise IT needs. If you try to compare a tiny slice of it with a single dimension comparison you can beat AWS but if you get the full picture it is getting harder to a point when you can't really beat it.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#229

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…

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.

> 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.

Reminds me of the days when I had to buy Windows to test if my website worked on IE.

In the case of Apple, I have to buy the hardware too!

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#230
post #157

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.

I just moved one of the largest (5+PB) data warehouses of Europe to AWS and we saved 35% of a huge (1M+ / year) budget while increased reliability, availability and security. I am not sure why people think that AWS is expensive. Running on a traditional hosting was a nightmare with constant downtimes because of issues outside of our control. Cooling, networking, security you name it. AWS makes these non-existent or very easy to tackle. For example of networking, there are several teams of network engineers oncall for AWS the handle routing issues etc. and you just get an email about it. With the previous vendor we found about the issue, tried to reach the vendor and we had to convince them that there is an issue and it took them 2 days to recover.

I am planning to move to AWS more entreprise clients for saving significant money on IT. AWS is most definitely a competitive option for this.

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