111–120 of 191 posts
Clouds are migrating to AMD and Amazon kicks back with home grown cores. Ouch. Chip vendors have to let go of their ISAs, no one cares, as long as you can run Debian on it.
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Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good money that will become a requirement for services). They're also more forward thinking and experimental than most companies are, or can afford to be. The x86 is the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" of CPUs. This promises to be quite interesting. If Amazon can pr…
Yes, that's great for amazon, but what about everyone else on the planet who has x86-64 hypervisors and would like to have the option of purchasing a 3rd choice of CPU which is not Intel or AMD, at a price/performance ratio that is somewhat competitive with existing options?
If Amazon can prove ARM can cope with server scale operations, and even outperform x86-64, you can have a high degree of confidence that other companies will get in the game. There are many more companies manufacturing ARM chips than x86-64 (due to licensing agreements, in part)
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Chiplets are more significant than you credit them for. They allow higher yields and make the production economics much more favorable for AMD, whereas Intel is throwing out a lot more silicon.
Yield might be part of it, but I'm sure intel can ship partially functional chips with a core here/there disabled. Another of the big advantages for AMD is that their products aren't reticle limited. The basic design lets them have a single design they bolt into dozens of configurations that scale larger than what intel can fit on a single die. Hence 64 "big" cores in a single socket. There are likely other advantage…
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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.
Except MIPS and the network.
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.
An ARM workstation is going to fly like a Cessna.
What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk, network, power...
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…
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It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience
It’s generally hard to buy AMD CPUs period.
Maybe they figured availability finally, at least for systems producers.
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Yield might be part of it, but I'm sure intel can ship partially functional chips with a core here/there disabled. Another of the big advantages for AMD is that their products aren't reticle limited. The basic design lets them have a single design they bolt into dozens of configurations that scale larger than what intel can fit on a single die. Hence 64 "big" cores in a single socket. There are likely other advantage…
Do a simulation, chiplets extract multiples of revenue more than binning on failed functional units. Lots of functional blocks are NOT redundant, leading to the total loss of part. At these small feature sizes and massive chip areas, yields are down. Chiplets avoid this.
Bottom line, I don't believe that intels product lines prices in any way reflect what the actual yield curves are.
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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.