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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#321

Post by gpderetta »

pitaj wrote: post #292
m_mueller wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK, supposedly TMSC 7nm and Intel 10nm are about equivalent, but with 10nm being in a limbo, TMSC is ahead now.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#322

Post by gpderetta »

Symmetry wrote: post #257
gpderetta wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(generalized) predication is not a thing in ARM64. Is Apple cpu 7 wide even in 32 bit mode?

It is true though, as chroma pointed out, that intel can't decode load-op as full width.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#323

Post by jawnv6 »

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…

sure, so what's your 6 byte equivalent ARM for FXSAVE/FXRSTOR?

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#324

Post by jawnv6 »

electrograv wrote: post #80
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…

> It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips As a strategic move, this makes a lot of sense for Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is a company known for excellence in a diverse set of disciplines, and TSMC has an excellent reputation for delivering state-of-the-art CPUs at scale — yet you are here to doubt they can pull it off, despite providing no evidence or rationale for your position? T…

how many amazon customers have they migrated to their existing ARM solutions?

like that's the bit that's missing, the servers sitting on a rack are meaningless without ARM customers, and amazon chips not existing didn't somehow prevent the demand. they sell arm compute now and it's a paltry fraction of the whole. pretending it's about TSMC scaling is ridiculous.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#325

Post by jawnv6 »

uncoder0 wrote: post #75
jawnv6 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that. Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelera…

Only replying to the claim of disrespect. I think the disclaimer, as included, in a post positing a thesis is not disrespectful at all. gp clearly laid out that they were not an expert but had an assumption. I will agree though that done without a disclaimer gp would have been disrespectful.

disclaimer should have been in the first post, not a reply to a reply long after the confident assertions over what a "storage" CPU must do.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#326

Post by llampx »

stdplaceholder wrote: post #79
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD are in a great place. TSMC's 7nm is in great shape (unlike Intel's 10nm), and AMD's multi-chip architecture allows them to get vastly better effective yields for high-core-count “chips”. They will be selling superior CPU to Intel's and they will be making them at significantly lower cost, while Intel is struggling to compete, stuck with monolithic chips on 14nm.

I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but t…

Is there no benchmark that measures the EPYC and Xeon chips on "large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production"? From everything I've seen, the Zen architecture is a win across the board.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#327

Post by jawnv6 »

basilgohar wrote: post #109
jawnv6 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that. Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelera…

And yet, here he/she gets exactly the result they were looking for. It's a well known online trope that you get your question answered faster and more thoroughly by posting a wrong answer first rather than plainly asking. My guess is it triggers something primal in us geeks. See: https://xkcd.com/386/

It's still incredibly disrespectful way to approach a community, and all of these replies ignore the thrust of my question about the expert re-upping after this ruse has been made apparent.

Comboy spread a lot of disinformation in the first post, like "I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it." before the lie was laid bare. Looking forward to arguing with "FPGA experts" who harken back to that post as their primary source.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#328

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

danmaz74 wrote: post #253
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but I'm concerned with the initial provisioning of the OS on which docker runs. It's not nothing even if the apps run in docker.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#329

Post by monocasa »

llampx wrote: post #319
monocasa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is AMD (they're shutting down GloFlo).

AMD is a TSMC customer but GlobalFoundries is far from shutting down.

AMD isn't shipping any new GloFlo processors, and GloFlo either laid off or shifted their all of their R&D to sustaining.

That's as close to shutting down as foundries get.

Re: Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

#330

Post by danmaz74 »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #328
danmaz74 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, but I'm concerned with the initial provisioning of the OS on which docker runs. It's not nothing even if the apps run in docker.

In most cases, you can just provision the OS from a web interface. If you get a bigger machine where you need to configure the disks yourself, there is a pretty easy to use command line tool they built which does most of the work.

The only part which I had to learn the hard way is configuring iptables to secure my servers against external attacks. Luckily, recent versions of docker make it easy to keep iptables configured - at the beginning, that was almost a nightmare...

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