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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#251

Post by bogomipz »

Nokinside wrote: post #41
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…

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own vari…

Might you or anyone else be able to recommend a book or some literature on business and logistical side of third party chip design like this? Maybe something with some case studies?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#252

Post by Symmetry »

stcredzero wrote: post #73
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.

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?

Those profs were still living in 1990 when the x86 tax was still a real issue. As cores get bigger the extra effort involved in handling the x86 ISA gets proportionally smaller. x86 has a accumulated a lot of features over the years and figuring out how, e.g., call gates interact with mis-speculated branches means an x86 design will take more engineering effort than an equivalent RISC design. But with Intel's huge volumes they can more than afford that extra effort.

Of course Intel has traditionally always used their volume to be ahead in process technology and at the moment they seem to be slipping behind. So who knows.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#253

Post by danmaz74 »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #241
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.

I have so far found Hetzner Dedicated servers to resist most forms of "infrastructure as code". I can't seem to even be able to restore one from an image... This applies only to dedicated ... but to me that's the interesting part of Hetzner. I might just use Ansible to provision Hetzner servers that I set up manually initially. The cost savings are there to make it worth the hassle. Wish there was a cleaner approach.

I wouldn't suggest to use that for the main DB, but for almost everything else docker works perfectly fine on Hetzner.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#254

Post by gpderetta »

aneutron wrote: post #150

They're ignoring the fact that it's not even the same ISA, not even the same use cases or maturity for these ISAs, and that for them to actually produce a x86 chip, the only way to do that is to licence either AMD or Intel as IIRC they're the only ones to hold the x86 patent. That or change the way a majority of the software stack was written for the past 15 years.

A lot of the software stack was rewritten in the past 10 year to make sure that it would work well on ARM though. ARM itself contributed to the effort.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#255

Post by Symmetry »

earenndil wrote: post #97
hermitdev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel chips are RISC under the hood these days (for a long while - decade or more). They're CISC at the ASM layer before the instructions are decoded and dispatched by the microcode.

CISC is still an asset rather than a liability, though, as it means you can fit more code into cache.

In theory, yes. In practice x86-64, while it was the right solution for the market, isn't a very efficient encoding and doesn't fit any more code in cache than pragmatic RISC designs like ARM. It still beats more purist RISC designs like MIPS but not by as much as pure x86 did.

It would be easy to design a variable length encoding scheme that was self-synchronizing and played nicely with decoding multiple instructions per clock. But legacy compatibility means that that scheme will not be x86 based.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#256

Post by bogomipz »

ethbro wrote: post #82
bstx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM architectural licensees develop their own microarchitectures that implement the ARM ISA spec, they do not license any particular microarchitecture from ARM (e.g. Cortex-A? IP cores). That includes Apple, Samsung, Nvidia and others.

But ARM actually has relatively few architectural licensees (~10 as of 2015). In reality, most of their licenses are processor (core+interfaces) or POP (pre-optimized processor designs). https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

Could you or someone else elaborate on the different type of licenses and why a company interested in licensing might opt for one over another? I was surprised by the OPs comment that few companies actually license microarchitecture as I thought that's what Apple has been doing with ARM.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#257

Post by Symmetry »

gpderetta wrote: post #136
chroma wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's an advantage these days. The bottleneck seems to be decoding instructions, and that's easier to parallelize if instructions are fixed width. Case in point: The big cores on Apple's A11 and A12 SoCs can decode 7 instructions per cycle. Intel's Skylake can do 5. Intel CPUs also have μop caches because decoding x86 is so expensive.

Sure, but intel CISC instructions can do more, so in the end is a wash.

That really isn't true in the modern world. x86 has things like load-op and large inline constants but ARM has things like load or store multiple, predication, and more registers. They tend to take about the same number of instructions per executable and about the same number of bytes per instruction.

If you're comparing to MIPS then sure x86 is more efficient. And x86 is instruction do more than RISC-V but most high performance RISC-V uses instruction compression and front end fusion for similar pipeline and cache usage.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#258

Post by zaarn »

SonicSoul wrote: post #250
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 a very interesting dynamic to me. Amazon seems to compete on price with EVERYONE on everything else, yet when it comes to AWS they’re so much more expensive than competition? Is this because their infrastructure is so much more expensive to run at 0 margins?

AWS still offers a very integrated experience and lots of people will simply pick AWS because of the brand name. Most people hosting SaaS or similar on the web don't actually need that much resources so for 98% of startups, I'd bet that AWS isn't the largest entry on their monthly running costs.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#259

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

For large datacenters, excepting labor, on premises costs are usually an order or two of magnitude lower than Amazon, so you can ignore all the details. Specifically on labor, computers don't need that much of upkeep (unless you depend on flaky software, but then Amazon won't help you anyway), so it's a matter of having enough of them to justify hiring 2 people. if you do, you are better keeping them on premises. Besides, adapting your software for Amazon isn't free either.

For small datacenters, there are plenty of VPS, server rentals and colos around with prices an order of magnitude lower than Amazon. The labor cost of setting those up is comparable to the cost of adapting your software for Amazon, with the added benefit that you aren't locked in.

AWS has a few unique value propositions. If you require stuff very different from the usual (eg. a lot of disk with little CPU and RAM) it will let you personalize your system like no other place. If you have a very low mean resource usage with rare incredibly large peaks, the scaling will become interesting. But it is simply not a good choice for 90% of the folks out there. To go through your list, fault tolerance through Amazon is not that great, it need a lot of set-up (adapting your software), and adds enough complexity that I doubt it increases reliability; I don't know about compilance; about security, I only see problems; and integration is what AWS systems do worse, since network traffic is so expensive.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#260

Post by foxhop »

nova22033 wrote: post #224
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…

>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?

I recommend Joyent (acquired by Samsung).

They open source all their software (and make it easy to install and use). Their hypervisor operating system (SmartOS) rocks so hard. They also released Manta (S3 alternative object store).

If Joyent ever changed direction, or shut down, I have an unlocked path forward with a community to help me continue on my own hardware. I can build my own cloud if push comes to shove.

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