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Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#51

Post by atq2119 »

StreamBright wrote: post #4
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

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 compromis…

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

Keep in mind that getting 40% better price performance doesn't mean their tech is better. It could just mean they're cutting margins (to drive adoption).

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#52

Post by atq2119 »

jonstewart wrote: post #47
dman wrote: post #10

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 a…

Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile p…

Little endian has nothing to do with CISC vs RISC or x86 though. Everybody is little endian today.

x86 helped with that historically, certainly, but fundamentally endianness just doesn't matter most of the time, and when it does, little endian makes more sense from first principles.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#53

Post by asah »

imtringued wrote: post #37
bastawhiz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah exactly, you're not going to skimp on the CPU by choosing ARM to save $500 a year when you have software that costs you thousands every single year. You're going to stick with x86_64 instead of the crappy budget option that doesn't even run your software.

Twist: enterprise software goes the way of IBM mainframes, with a small number of large customers paying crazy prices for compliance and customization, and everything in the hardware/software stack being 10+x more expensive than its commodity equivalent.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#54

Post by techntoke »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

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 compromis…

But who cares about a R&D processor that you can only use on a specific cloud hosting provider? All people will care about is if they will have to modify their applications to utilize it, and knowing Amazon that is precisely what they'll try to do. AWS is anti-competitive and it should raise alarms with many in the tech community.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#55

Post by gautamcgoel »

I wish individual consumers could go out and buy these processors. Amazon really has little incentive to sell them - they are not primarily a chip manufacturing business, and anyways, why give away their hard-fought competitive advantage? - but damn, it would be cool to stick one of these in a workstation and watch it fly.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#56

Post by __d »

bastawhiz wrote: post #22
nordsieck wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

Does anyone run proprietary software in a cloud context?

The whole point is that the hardware becomes as flexible as the software, spin up, spin down, blow it away and deploy a fresh instance if something goes wrong.

I can't see many people trying to do that with proprietary licensing?

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#57

Post by jiggawatts »

dman wrote: post #10

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 a…

> 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

Oddly, Intel ought to have an edge here, because they have been selling chips with embedded 100 Gbps Ethernet controllers on-die.

However, I've never seen such a beast in data centre, I suspect they've "reserved" this feature for HPC workloads only.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#58

Post by __d »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
koolba wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital cost is only one part of the equation. These modern ARM cores have insane per-watt performance and that’s what adds up for horizontally scalable services.

RISC-V chips will handily beat ARM on performance per watt, given similar specs and fabrication technology. The margin is not insanely large but it's definitely substantial in existing benchmarks.

Which will be great, just as soon as someone comes out with a competitive server CPU + chipset.

Surely these are in development, but based on the ARM experience, it'll be at least 5 years from availability of reasonable parts to any decent volume.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#60

Post by wmf »

jiggawatts wrote: post #57
dman wrote: post #10

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 a…

> 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 Oddly, Intel ought to have an edge here, because they have been selling chips with embedded 100 Gbps Ethernet controllers on-die. However, I've never seen such a beast in data centre, I suspect they've "reserved" this feature for HPC workloads only.

That was 100G Omni-Path (not Ethernet compatible) which has been subsequently canceled, I guess due to lack of demand. Intel's 100G Ethernet NICs were years behind other vendors due to the 10 nm fiasco.
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