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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#261

Post by nostrebored »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #121
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

Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.

I've literally never heard this from anyone who's used both at an enterprise level. Personally I recommended azure a few years ago rather than aws for a docker based microservice app but the biggest drawback was the cost. What exactly are you running that's cheaper?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#262

Post by acdha »

marcosdumay wrote: post #259
greyskull wrote: post #149

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…

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. Bes…

> 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.

That’s too big a caveat to breeze by without a huge justification. If you look at the full cost that 1-2 orders of magnitude for many places goes negative and is a smaller margin for almost everyone else unless you have some combination of very high usage to amortize your staff costs over and/or the ability to change the problem (e.g. beating S3 with fewer copies or using cold storage, having simpler or slower ops or security, etc.).

It can be done but I’ve seen far more people achieve it through incomplete comparisons than actual measured TCO, especially when you consider the first outage where they’re down for a week longer because they learned something important about how data centers can fail.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#263

Post by jplayer01 »

rbanffy wrote: post #167
pjc50 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US government (and other major purchaser) "second sourcing" regulations are a longstanding attempt to keep a competitive market in situations where it would otherwise collapse into a monopoly. That's how Intel came to share x86 with AMD in the first place.

Yes, but I'm not sure it's still as influential as it was in the 80's and 90's

I'm not sure what you mean. We wouldn't have AMD now, and the utterly non-competitive x86 CPU market would look entirely different than it does now. Despite AMD not being competitive on performance in the past ~10ish years, they were still an alternative if Intel ever really dropped the ball or went off the rails on exploitative business practices. Without that counterweight, there would've been no limit to what Intel could've done.

More needs to be done to ensure proprietary silos like Apple, but second sourcing has, largely, done its job.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#264

Post by acdha »

pjmlp wrote: post #237
askafriend wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are lots of places where you rarely see PCs, too, but that doesn’t mean that Intel and AMD don’t sell a lot of chips. 200M per year is well into the economies of scale range.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#265

Post by StreamBright »

zaarn wrote: post #233
StreamBright wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

I guess you just downplay the amount of money you spend on developing your own solutions. What does a load balancer do on the same host anyway?

Where is this 80x-100x coming from? It would be impossible to create a 100 times cheaper solution because it would mean there is no margin left for the hosting provider.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#266

Post by syntaxing »

I thought Amazon is just licensing a custom design from ARM and manufacturing from TSMC. It's a step in the right direction but it'll be a good amount of years before Amazon has their own Fab making their own chips.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#267

Post by castlecrasher2 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #180
greyskull wrote: post #149

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…

You can buy a 16-32 core machine with 64GB Ram for less than a hundred bucks on Hetzner. You can run SmartOS, proxmox, danubecloud or whatever other solution there, and for some of them you should be able to use terraform. There is a little extra upfront cost to set these things up, but once you have it, it's fine. You can do your zfs snapshots to hetzners backup infrastructure. A lot of people try to throw all their…

I also haven't done baremetal server management, but my first concern with your first line is what do you do when as your services expand as does your dev team and the org needs more processes like log management, data warehousing, analytics, or whatever else AWS offers?

I'll admit this isn't always true (looking at you, Neptune) but I find AWS' key strength is the huge community, so most of its services have 1) decent documentation and 2) many users to refer to with technical questions as well as filling out roles.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#268

Post by jplayer01 »

gpderetta wrote: post #220
antod wrote: post #171

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. 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).

Their plan C was a complete fluke and only came together because the Israelis managed to put out Centrino. I don't think such a fluke is possible when we're at the limits of process design and everything takes tens of billions of dollars and half a decade of lead time to implement.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#269

Post by bogomipz »

gpderetta wrote: post #220
antod wrote: post #171

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. 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).

I'm not that up on Intel at the moment. Why are they stuck at more iterations of the lake architecture with little changes?

What was the plan "A"?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#270

Post by bogomipz »

Symmetry wrote: post #252
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?

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 vo…

>"As cores get bigger the extra effort involved in handling the x86 ISA gets proportionally smaller."

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Do you mean as the number of cores gets bigger? Surely the size of the cores has been shrinking no?

>"Of course Intel has traditionally always used their volume to be ahead in process technology"

What's the correlation between larger volumes and quicker advances in process technology? Is it simply more cash to put back into R and D?

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