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Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#61

Post by api »

atq2119 wrote: post #52
jonstewart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anyone wants to see why little endian is better try implementing a sigint. Big endian makes everything backwards in terms of iteration order.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#62

Post by wmf »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #55

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.

I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#63

Post by privateSFacct »

brianwawok wrote: post #9
localhost wrote: post #6

Earlier 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

It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#64

Post by takeda »

api wrote: post #61
atq2119 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anyone wants to see why little endian is better try implementing a sigint. Big endian makes everything backwards in terms of iteration order.

You are presenting argument in favor of little endian, yet you're provide enough information that is only useful for someone who already knows the answer.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#65

Post by closeparen »

__d wrote: post #56
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.

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?

Absolutely. You can even get the license and support contract costs built into the instance’s hourly rate. RHEL, Oracle DB, Windows Server, and SQL Server are all offered this way.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#66

Post by dogma1138 »

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…

All modern x86 CPUs are essentially “RISC” CPUs that translate x86 instructions into uOPS so they already do what you want to do.

I’m not seeing why the higher level x86 instruction set needs to be jettisoned or killed off...

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#67

Post by goosehonk »

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…

This comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to program around “. Not sure they should feel too bad about missing that boat.

What Intel really should be worried about is the client side being their largest revenue segment. That’s a dead business, eventually. And the bets they made didn’t pan out: FPGAs aren’t popular because the people sophisticated enough to use them are also smart enough to tape out ASICs. IoT is not a thing.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#68

Post by gautamcgoel »

wmf wrote: post #62
gautamcgoel wrote: post #55

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.

I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)

Oh, interesting. Is Graviton designed in collaboration with Ampere?

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#69

Post by goosehonk »

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…

ARM has never enjoyed a Op/J advantage over x86. They have low-power designs, yes, but they don’t do more work for a given amount of energy.

x86 won fair and square. The risc people failed to foresee that instruction density would be extremely important to performance. Intel didn’t beat them with physics. CISC is just fundamentally better.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#70

Post by wmf »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #68
wmf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)

Oh, interesting. Is Graviton designed in collaboration with Ampere?

No, but one has 64 N1 cores and the other has 80 N1 cores, probably with similar memory controllers and PCIe as well.
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