Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

This is an interesting twist in the processor wars, here is the #1 cloud company that is turning its profits in providing cloud services in to processor R&D to build new CPUs.

This is a much more important announcement than the press is giving it credit for.

I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android.

Doing this both takes away Intel's ability to 'gate' what is and isn't a cellphone processor, and their ability to set the margins they would like.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been designing and building their own server designs for years. This takes away Intel's ability to gate their choices at the Server manufacturer. As a result more AMD server processors were deployed by these three companies than the rest of the market combined.

Now Amazon is taking profits from the AWS service and re-investing them in bespoke CPUs that are tuned to the workloads they can see customers running on their infrastructure. As a result they will not only enhance their cost/power edge over Google, Microsoft, and everyone else, their infrastructure can be better than anything you can buy in order to run your own workload, locking you into their service (a moat if you will for keeping you there).

If they succeed, Google and Facebook will follow suit. (I am guessing Google already is well down this path, knowing them but also knowing their secrecy about such things)

If you take 50% of the enterprise server market out of Intel's portfolio they are left fighting for enthusiast/gamer share and AMD is eating their lunch there.

It is going to be really interesting to watch this play out.

Intel became too big and too slow. Their R&D efforts are not as efficient as Apple's or in this case Amazon's. This story also proves that in many cases you are better off with a specific design instead of a generic one. If the marketing message is true Amazon has a huge edge.[1]

1. 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances

AMD is also eating Intel's lunch in datacenter. Last time I checked (I don't keep track of Intel pricing) AMD had a 5x price/performance advantage over Intel at the launch of EPYC ROME.

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797

If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts.

a. The 10nm process fiasco

b. Missing the chiplet concept

c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason about whether it makes sense to use it for mixed workloads.

d. With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads

e. ARM eating their lunch in mobile

f. Nvidia eating their lunch with GPGPU

g. Big players are increasingly building accelerators for critical workloads that offer better power / performance

h. Strong execution from AMD for the first time in over a decade

i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful for the user.