Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
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Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#2Basically the playbook for the cloud providers is to pretend that Intel and AMD don’t need to worry about it for as long as possible, then suddenly they will be close to price parity and then it’s bad news for Intel and AMDs server business.. hard to say on timeline though.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#3Napkins Maths.
Intel make roughly $20B from Datacenter this year, and the estimate was nearly 50% goes to the HyperScaler, which is AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba etc.
And AWS owns more than 50% of the HyperScaler market, so that is at least 25% of Intel's DC revenue going to Amazon, roughly $5B per year.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#4Anyone have thoughts on how this might compare to something like Ampere's ARM server chips? Seems like the custom chips are indeed ARM based as well? I saw some benchmarks recently on Ampere chips that had me fairly impressed.
https://kinvolk.io/blog/2019/11/comparative-benchmark-of-amp...
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#5This is exciting!
I use AWS's existing a1 generation for map-reduce jobs on the Common Crawl. They're slower in absolute terms than the Intel-based c5 generation, but are cheaper on a $/GB-processed basis. This is despite my runtime of choice (the JVM) being much more heavily optimized for x86 than for ARM. I can imagine there's a lot of headroom for improvements both at the hardware level and at the software optimization level as adoption grows.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#6Basically the playbook for the cloud providers is to pretend that Intel and AMD don’t need to worry about it for as long as possible, then suddenly they will be close to price parity and then it’s bad news for Intel and AMDs server business.. hard to say on timeline though.
Makes sense. In 2012, I was at a Fortune 10 oil and gas company that suddenly got squeezed by Oracle as our licenses were expiring. Given that most of the in house software was running on Oracle and leveraging one off functionality and APIs not standard in competitors or in the open source community and that most of the original devs had moved on (most were IT contractors anyway), we had little options. And the rates Oracle gave us were absurd, but they knew we were locked in, and they understood the industry was doin well and we had money (this is before the markets downward dive).
If you’re a cloud company, you absolutely, 100% do not want to depend on an Intel or AMD. If anything, as CEO, this is probably one of the what if scenarios that would keep you up at night.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#7Basically the playbook for the cloud providers is to pretend that Intel and AMD don’t need to worry about it for as long as possible, then suddenly they will be close to price parity and then it’s bad news for Intel and AMDs server business.. hard to say on timeline though.
Makes sense. In 2012, I was at a Fortune 10 oil and gas company that suddenly got squeezed by Oracle as our licenses were expiring. Given that most of the in house software was running on Oracle and leveraging one off functionality and APIs not standard in competitors or in the open source community and that most of the original devs had moved on (most were IT contractors anyway), we had little options. And the rates…
It goes in both directions a bit. Because the biggest cloud providers are so huge, they do drive a massive chunk of revenue for Intel especially. I remember watching a Q&A with Scott Guthrie where he mentioned how much friendlier the Intel folks are now that Azure is such an enormous customer.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#8Basically the playbook for the cloud providers is to pretend that Intel and AMD don’t need to worry about it for as long as possible, then suddenly they will be close to price parity and then it’s bad news for Intel and AMDs server business.. hard to say on timeline though.
While in theory there could be a lot more competition for arm based compute platforms, is there any risk of the cloud providers adding custom extensions to their silicon to increase performing, creating yet another platform lock-in? I'm thinking if the Intel compiler is somewhat analogous.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#9It really was a matter of time, but I honestly thought we’d see low cost Apple laptops with ARM CPUs before we saw much inroads in the data center.
As a developer, it’s never been easier for me to be cloud, OS, and CPU-architecture agnostic.
I’m sure AWS sees the writing on the wall, and I don’t see any other thing happening now other than a race to the bottom.
Re: Amazon's cloud unit readies more powerful data center chip – sources
#10Binary compatibility is the Moat that Intel and AMD have.
Try using ARM based server and you quickly realize the pain.
Besides, other Hyperscalers won't use Amazon's Chips. So no economy of scale.
Do you remember Amazon Phone ?