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Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#151

Post by ksec »

monocasa wrote: post #11
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…

> 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…

I guess not everyone read books about Steve Jobs.

It was Steve's idea that Intel had the best chip and Fab, and he wanted the best in iPhone. He was willing to wait for Intel to give him what he demands, the price he asked for was way lower than Intel's usual margin but very high for Apple's BOM Cost.

Ultimately one of this Top Engineers put his name badge on the table and said if Steve insist on Intel he will quit. Steve Jobs ultimately backed off. They than bought P.A. Semi and the rest is history.

Intel's failure to capture the iPhone SoC opportunity was described by Paul Otellini, Intel CEO at the time as the biggest missed opportunity / failure of his life. ( And I am still quite pissed they forced out Pat Gelsinger )

If Steve had persisted he would have repeated the same Apple Lisa mistake. And the world might not be quite the same.

*Makes me rather sentimental while typing this. I miss Steve Jobs.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#152

Post by [deleted] »

goosehonk wrote: post #131
monocasa wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It deputed on workstation accelerator cards. > 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. It very much could thermally throttle more than the one core. > “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction…

Basically all that stuff you said about IoT has been said verbatim for decades and yet here we are. Remember the "SmartMote"? Neither does anyone else. By the way that was _also_ an Intel-funded project.

[deleted]

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#153

Post by pjc50 »

monocasa wrote: post #89
goosehonk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It deputed on workstation accelerator cards. > 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. It very much could thermally throttle more than the one core. > “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction…

IoT is a thing .. that Intel failed to get into. They don't have anything that scales down that well. That market is dominated by ARM, implemented by all sorts of lower tier vendors like MediaTek.

FPGAs really need a tooling unlock to take off so they can be useful to people who haven't been on the ASIC design course.

> It won't make sense for anyone else in the US to compete

TSMC?

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#154

Post by pjc50 »

solidasparagus wrote: post #139
shaklee3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGAs are in a tough place. Like OP said, most people writing RTL make asics, or at least an asic that's programmable. The FPGA target market is getting slimmer, since we have programmable Asics, like GPUs and tpus, that are as performant with easier programming. They will still serve a niche market, but the "write c++ and run on an fpga" will likely never take off.

I thought the main market for FPGAs was that period between "we have a problem that needs custom hardware" and "we have custom hardware being produced at the scale we need". I guess that's a relatively niche market?

Pretty much. The problem set they're useful for is low-latency high-throughput stuff, and/or connectivity to high speed digital signals, for things that there isn't an existing custom solution and where you don't care about area or power consumption. That's not a huge market.

We do use them at my employer, a multinational chip company - but only in very small numbers, like one $50k board gets shared around project groups who use it for a few weeks each. Most of the work is done in simulation.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#155

Post by commandersaki »

goosehonk wrote: post #67
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 pr…

Ah yes the anti-vexxer argument. A good overview on AVX-512 and the criticism can be found here: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20190430-vectorize.html

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#156

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #141

What is "Graviton2" in this context? There's no Wikipedia page for it, and the regular google search results all loop back to this AWS announcement.

I am gathering that it's a chip, a CPU chip, seem to be ARM architecture not intel x86; and is an important chip or will be due to this? I don't know why though.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#157

Post by timthorn »

solidasparagus wrote: post #139
shaklee3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGAs are in a tough place. Like OP said, most people writing RTL make asics, or at least an asic that's programmable. The FPGA target market is getting slimmer, since we have programmable Asics, like GPUs and tpus, that are as performant with easier programming. They will still serve a niche market, but the "write c++ and run on an fpga" will likely never take off.

I thought the main market for FPGAs was that period between "we have a problem that needs custom hardware" and "we have custom hardware being produced at the scale we need". I guess that's a relatively niche market?

There's also the market for high performance things that need to be in-service upgradeable. I understand mobile base stations are a significant customer for large FPGAs, to enable deployment of new standards revisions/modulation schemes without a truck roll.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#158

Post by pjc50 »

mister_hn wrote: post #136
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…

About point i, using different languages than native is really weird and in the age of green computing really not efficient at all. UIs based on JavaScript, Python or even Java are heavier and less efficient than what a platform can do with native compiled code. There are now also loads of possibilities to build native code, squeezing the best performance, especially for critical systems. I still don't understand why…

Speed of development currently trumps everything else. Developers are expensive, electricity is cheap, and software changes at a high rate. If we could reduce the "churn" perhaps people could transition to optimised versions, but optimisation makes rapid change harder.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#159

Post by josh2600 »

solidasparagus wrote: post #101
goosehonk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Uhh source on AVX512 not downclocking on modern CPUs? We benchmarked ML workloads on the newest chips the cloud had to offer and the slowdown was a significant problem because, as the parent comment said, it is very hard to reason about whether the benefits of vectorized ops will outweigh the the reduced clock speed. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not - which is a major problem when you have to specify instr…

Djb’s article linked above answers this in detail. In short, vectorized instructions don’t have to hit ram to do things like addition, but they can heat up the processor beyond its ability to cool to operating temperatures. The clock speed drop is necessary to avoid overheating.

For more reading, check out cpu pipelining, as well as how vectorized instructions actually work. The performance benefit for well implemented vectorized instructions overcomes the clock speed hit by leaps and bounds, which is why mobile systems make such heavy use of them, for example.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#160

Post by StreamBright »

atq2119 wrote: post #51
StreamBright wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Absolutely. From the customer perspective does it matter? If later on it goes back to Intel levels than it means other cloud vendors can compete without a custom CPU. What worries me is what if it is true and not for the too thin margin?
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