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Intel Problems

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Re: Intel Problems

#131

Post by chasil »

Const-me wrote: post #92
ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…

As I understand it, ARM's new willingness to allow custom op-codes is dependent upon the customer preventing fragmentation of the ARM instruction set.

In theory, your software could run faster, or slower, depending upon Amazon's use of their extensions within their C library, or associated libraries in their software stack.

Maybe the wildest thing that I've heard is Fujitsu not implementing either 32-bit or Thumb on their new supercomputer. Is that a special case?

"But why doesn’t Apple document this and let us use these instructions directly? As mentioned earlier, this is something ARM Ltd. would like to avoid. If custom instructions are widely used it could fragment the ARM ecosystem."

https://medium.com/swlh/apples-m1-secret-coprocessor-6599492...

Re: Intel Problems

#132

Post by Slartie »

treve wrote: post #107
Const-me wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…

Maybe I'm missing something, but don't the vast majority of applications don't care about what architecture they run on? The main difference for us was lower bills.

Even if the applications don't care, there's still the (Docker) container, which cares very much, and which seems to be the vehicle of choice to package and deliver many cloud-based applications today. Being able to actually run the exact same containers on your dev machine which are going to be running on the servers later is definitely a big plus.

Re: Intel Problems

#133

Post by klelatti »

blinkingled wrote: post #113
klelatti wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel / AMD had a duopoly on desktop / server because of x86 for a large number of years. Loss of that duopoly - even with competitive manufacturing - has profound commercial implications for Intel. M1 and Graviton will be followed by others that will all erode Intel's business.

On the other hand if x86 keeps competitive there's lot of inertia in its favor. So it could go either way. Desktop especially has been a tough nut to crack for anyone other than Apple and they are only 8% of the market.

Probably more than 8% by value and with the hyperscalers looking at Arm that's a decent part of their business at risk - and that's ignoring what Nvidia, Qualcomm etc might do in the future.

Agreed that intertia is in their favour but it's not a great position to be in - it gives them a breathing space but not a long term competitive advantage.

Re: Intel Problems

#134

Post by gchamonlive »

Const-me wrote: post #92
ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…

I think OP was talking about managed services, like lambda, Ecs and beanstalk internal control, EC2 internal management system, that is systems that are transparent for the user.

AWS could very well run their platform systems entirely on graviton. After all, serverless and cloud is in essence someone else's server. AWS might as well run all their paas software on in-house architecture

Re: Intel Problems

#135

Post by jayd16 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

I guess I don't understand why the M1 makes developing on Graviton easier. It doesn't make Android or Windows ARM dev any easier.

I guess the idea is to run a Linux flavor that supports both the M1 and Graviton on the macs and hope any native work is compatible?

Re: Intel Problems

#136

Post by klelatti »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #75
klelatti wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days when Intel could single handedly successfully introduce a new (incompatible) ISA are long gone (if it ever could). I expect they will stick with x86 for as long as possible.

> The days when Intel could single handedly successfully introduce a new (incompatible) ISA are long gone (if it ever could). Given itanium, I'd say they never could (although that could have been a fluke of that specific design)

Indeed and that was with HP.

Look long enough back and you have iAPX 432!

Re: Intel Problems

#137

Post by Const-me »

dragontamer wrote: post #98
Const-me wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but... maybe elaborating in a contrary manner? Graviton ARM is certainly vendor lock-in to Amazon. But a Graviton ARM is just a bog-standard Neoverse N1 core. Which means the core is going to show similar characteristics as the Ampere Altra (also a bog-standard Neoverse N1 core). There's more to a chip than its core. But... from a performance-portability and ISA perspective..…

> you'd expect performance-portability between Graviton ARM and Ampere Altra

I agree, that would what I would expect too. Still, are there many public clouds built of these Ampere Altra-s? Maybe we gonna have them widespread soon, but until then I wouldn’t want to build stuff that only runs on Amazon or my own servers with only a few on the market and not yet globally available on retail.

Also, AFAIK on ARM the parts where CPUs integrate with the rest of the hardware are custom. The important thing for servers, disk and network I/O differs across ARM chips of the same ISA. Linux kernel abstracts it away i.e. stuff is likely to work, but I’m not so sure about performance portability.

Re: Intel Problems

#138

Post by deaddodo »

afavour wrote: post #102
tapirl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel's fate predicted in 2014: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErrFtv0UwAA4JaW?format=png

On the flip side that post illustrates just how things can go wrong, too: Windows RT was a flop.

Precisely for the reasons he gave though. It wasn't a unified experience. RT had lackluster support, no compatibility and a stripped down experience.

They're trying to fix it with Windows on ARM now, but that's what people were asking for back then.

Re: Intel Problems

#139

Post by chaorace »

jng wrote: post #101
thoughtsimple wrote: post #55

How does Moore's law figure into this? I suspect that TSMC runs into the wall that is quantum physics at around 1-2nm. Considering that TSMC has said that they will be in full production of 3nm in 2022, I can't see 1nm being much beyond 2026-2028. What happens then? Does a stall in die shrinks allow other fabs to catch up? It appears to me that Intel stalling at 14nm is what opened the door for TSMC and Samsung to ca…

Modern process node designations (5nm, 3nm...) are not measurements any more, they are marketing terms. The actual measure of shrinking is a lot smaller than the name would mean to indicate, and not approaching the quantum limits as fast as it may seem.

I did not know that! Though, that answer raises its own questions...

If the two are entirely unlinked, what's stopping Intel from slapping "Now 3nm!" on their next gen processors? Surely some components must be at the advertised size, even if it's no longer a clear cut all-or-nothing descriptor, right? What's actually being sized down and why is it seemingly posing so many challenges for Intel's supply chain?

Re: Intel Problems

#140

Post by ksec »

ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

I commented [1] on something similar a few days ago,

>Cloud (Intel) isn’t really challenged yet....

AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers.

HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business.

HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market.

HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon.

AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing x86 services to those who needs it )

Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server.

>The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there.

Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86 instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU = Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30% cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by large margin.

If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time, that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market.

Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. (Half of) The lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very hard, had no experience in market and product business. Luckily that is about to change.

Evaluating ARM switch takes time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly, getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856

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