Are we thinking Intel is Amazon’s next Barnes and Noble?
AMD already doing that to Intel
Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
21–30 of 191 posts
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#22The pricing level for the ARM instances should be interesting. If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in.
> If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in. Adoption? Sure. Lock-in? Umm... Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source. The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly works - is the same reason they can leave easily…
> and most software on Linux is distributed as source
Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
Winning a benchmark by a wide margin is pretty close if you have your foot in the door, which of course AMD does not.
Their success here is going to be nonlinear depending on how long they stay in the lead.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
True, but these things take time to move mostly due to time-constrained contracts.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#25Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessar…
> Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick.
Maybe it’s a latency vs throughput thing?
As far as I know, ARM is great at balancing latency and power consumption, but behind x64 in throughput. [citation needed]
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#26This 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 compromis…
> 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. Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through…
At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their closest competitor).
There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never provided it.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#27Are we thinking Intel is Amazon’s next Barnes and Noble?
AMD already doing that to Intel
Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz.
I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business.
Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through…
At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licen…
I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel.
Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original Pentium.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#29Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessar…
> Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server.
Depending what what performance level you're looking at, they're a very large fraction of the server cost. Get a dual or quad socket board and buy the higher end CPUs and you might be looking at well over half the cost.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in. Adoption? Sure. Lock-in? Umm... Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source. The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly works - is the same reason they can leave easily…
> and most software on Linux is distributed as source Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.
How many of those "precompiled binaries" are truly performance critical? If it's just a single component, you can run it in qemu-user mode and still come out ahead overall.