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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#231

Post by ctack »

n-gatedotcom wrote: post #69
stcredzero wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. So they had a particular advantage, and exploited the heck out of it, but now the potency of that advantage is largely gone?

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.

Knots as in ducks?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#232

Post by StreamBright »

sanxiyn wrote: post #118
giancarlostoro wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand this, they already share some of the source to several OS components. Do you care to elaborate a bit on this? Is there some GPL clause or something that became too risky for Apple or something? How do BSD projects get by with the newer licenses aside from already being open source it doesnt seem to affect their underlying license...

Allegedly, Apple hates GPLv3.

Not only Apple but almost every enterprise.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#233

Post by zaarn »

StreamBright wrote: post #228
zaarn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Availability over this year has been about 99.9% for the network, if I need more I can book a server in a different DC and do failovers. There is an SLA you can optionally book.

I don't require a data warehouse, load balancers (beyond HAProxy on the same host) or SOC Compliance at the moment, if I need those, I can build them.

Not all businesses go for the cheapest option but on the flipside if Amazon costs 80x of other providers, the business will probably just find two sysadmins and contract them for the work.

Even if you need bigger, load balancers are available as hardware, they're fairly cheap compared to AWS offerings and come with in-built firewall. Incoming traffic remains free on these. Your ISP will probably peer much cheaper than AWS and Hetzner if you're bringing enough money to justify it.

I know several corporations that do their entire IT out of AWS, some of them use inhouse and others scatter their usage across several cloud providers, AWS would likely increase their operating cost by 100x.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#234

Post by pjmlp »

reikonomusha wrote: post #103
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…

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.

Historical accident of rebooting Copland with NeXTSTEP, which wasn't even relevant for NeXT beyond bringing developers into NeXTSTEP world.

The real Apple developer culture is around Objective-C and Swift tooling, alongside OS Frameworks, none of them related to UNIX in any form.

In case you haven't been paying attention the new network stack isn't even based on POSIX sockets.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#235

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #172
adrianN wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like it doesn't have a native Win32 environment, rather different personalities built on top of a common layer.

UNIX environment on Windows is just like how IBM and Unisys mainframes deal with it.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#236

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Likewise if AMD wasn't a thing maybe this laptop would be running Itanium instead.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#237

Post by pjmlp »

askafriend wrote: post #130
40acres wrote: post #8

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's ha…

Apple sold 217 MILLION iPhones in just 2017 alone. That's a number that doesn't include iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Macs - all of which have custom Apple silicon in them. I think you're severely underestimating Apple here.

There are lots of countries around the world where common people hardly get to see an Apple device on the wild.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#238

Post by teddyh »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #110
adrianN wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

I dont understand this, they already share some of the source to several OS components. Do you care to elaborate a bit on this? Is there some GPL clause or something that became too risky for Apple or something? How do BSD projects get by with the newer licenses aside from already being open source it doesnt seem to affect their underlying license...

More details here:

http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

[…]

Anyway, the message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#239

Post by agopaul »

rbanffy wrote: post #153
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

The Google cloud solutions are very competitive in price with the AWS ones.

Google doesn't seem to be serious with their managed DBMS solutions. The PostgreSQL version is still 9.6 even though 11 has been released, whereas AWS already has pg 11 available.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#240

Post by lmilcin »

tasubotadas wrote: post #213
m_mueller wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having set up couple of clusters myself, professionally, I can say setup is extremely easy relative to the functionality you are getting if you wanted to get it by traditional means (traditional = pre-cloud tech).

What is complicated is that this absolutely does not absolve you from having to understand everything that is happening under the hood. If you feel Kubernetes replaces that requirement you are doomed first time a non-trivial issue happens.

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