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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#291

Post by 3pt14159 »

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 DigitalOcean. Enough of the stuff you need, without the annoyances that come with dealing with AWS.

That said, when meltdown / spectre was announced AWS was already patched. The rest of us on hipster VPS providers had to cross our fingers. One of the main things I dislike about per-minute billing for servers is that it's too easy for bad actors to cycle through if there is some sort of side channel attack.

I remember when I first heard of the concept of VPSes. My initial reaction was "seems risky" but I was young and lots of older, smarter people assured me it was ok. Now I've grown used to them and all the luxury goodness they provide and I don't want to go back. It's like car ownership and finding out that all that cycling around town before you were old enough to get a license was what kept you looking fit.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#292

Post by pitaj »

m_mueller wrote: post #249
gpderetta wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

doesn't it look like they're shifting to do chiplets as well at the moment? copying AMD might be their plan C, but it won't help if AMD can steam ahead with TSMC 7nm while Intel is locked to 14nm for a couple of years. That's going to hurt a lot.

TSMC's 7nm and Intel's 14nm are about the same in actual dimensions on silicon IIRC. The names for the processes are mostly fluff.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#293

Post by projektfu »

zumu wrote: post #134
projektfu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.

> it... is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. AWS is what is actively taking over data centers. If it were to start running on Amazon chips, the result may possibly the same.

I wonder how much of the overall datacenter/server market Amazon and other cloud providers have captured.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#294

Post by gpderetta »

bogomipz wrote: post #269
gpderetta wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Get 10nm out.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#295

Post by gpderetta »

jplayer01 wrote: post #268
gpderetta wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having multiple competent design teams working on potentially competing products all the time is one of the strengths of Intel, I wouldn't call it a fluke.

Things do look dire right now, I agree.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#296

Post by hellisothers »

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…

Apple isn’t forcing anybody to do anything. Not only do you have other options, they’re not even the biggest fish and they’re not trying to be.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#297

Post by bogomipz »

Symmetry wrote: post #255
earenndil wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 instruction…

>"It would be easy to design a variable length encoding scheme that was self-synchronizing and played nicely with decoding multiple instructions per clock."

How might a self-synchronizing encoding scheme work? How could a decoder be divorced from the clock pulse? I am intrigued by this idea.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#298

Post by leowoo91 »

srinikoganti wrote: post #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 ?

What is worrying me more is that we are all stuck on idea of being locked-in to any vendor. Why can't we focus on innovation instead? Take Instagram for e.g. they started with AWS right? Then moved on the real hardware within few weeks (if I remember correctly) after acquisition. I understand, cost of the unseen problems are high, but it might be good idea to remember it also much depends on delivering speed.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#299

Post by Koshkin »

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.

Yes, you can write a UNIX program that will run on MacOS. You can even use Autotools and X Window API. On the other hand, a usual MacOS application is not "a UNIX program."

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#300

Post by aarbor989 »

zaarn wrote: post #191
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…

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…

Not disagreeing with your points, but internal traffic is free between the same AZ on AWS
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