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Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#31

Post by daxfohl »

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…

Also, end of Moore's law, slowing down the upgrade cycle and making CPU more of a commodity business.

I'll add a caveat to (d) because distributed can also mean distributed across cores, and whoever handles that the best gets a strong differentiator.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#32

Post by bdcravens »

social_quotient wrote: post #27
derision wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD already doing that to Intel

Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz. I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.

> when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business.

Early on, books sales was Amazon's core business.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#33

Post by kbenson »

monocasa wrote: post #28
kbenson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licen…

I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel. Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Everyone was waiting for Intel, either to switch ot to know how to respond to compete.

Inthink if Intel came out with a compelling product, Apple would have switched. I suspect they invested in ARM because it made sense at the iPod level, but once you start converging mobile and desktop experiences, there are major benefits to having the same architecture for both. Just look at how rampant the ARM MacBook rumors have been for the last few years.

I think the ARM investment by Apple was good regardless of whether they wanted to switch to Intel for higher end mobile, so I don't see it as evidence as to why they didn't want to.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#34

Post by monocasa »

kbenson wrote: post #33
monocasa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel. Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Everyone was waiting for Intel, either to switch ot to know how to respond to compete. Inthink if Intel came out with a compelling product, Apple would have switched. I suspect they invested in ARM because it made sense at the iPod level, but once you start converging mobile and desktop experiences, there are major benefits to having the same architecture for both. Just look at how rampant the ARM MacBook rumors have…

They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Nobody was waiting for Intel to get into the cellphone market. The TDP of Intel chips just never made sense, and it was clear that this was because they just didn't institutionally care about that market segment in a real way.

Maybe pundits were waiting, but nobody serious.

Edit: and all these ARM desktop rumors are just that, rumors. They have the ability to ship a competive low to mid end laptop on their own arm chips today, and aren't. Their wide OoO designs would run beautifully in a formfactor that isn't thermally throttled so much. IMO they don't want to switch ISAs and are waiting out the x86_64 patents.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#35

Post by jws »

rb808 wrote: post #19

Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessar…

I'm not sure about MIPS, but over the years there were times when Alpha, Sparc, and PowerPC were each ahead of x86 in performance. Intel outpaced them by using their huge volume sales to invest in fabrication improvement at a scale none of them could hope to match, going to ever more complicated internal architectures, and a dash of perfectly legal but slightly expensive tricks (like hiring away key designers).

Intel stumbled in fabrication and complicated architecture is having a bit of a growing pain. The CPU market doesn't make revenue like it used it – very few desktop users feel the need to upgrade every two years and for many applications pretty much any CPU is fast enough. Growth in the cloud market could be good, but any thing that threatens their market share of the cloud is threat to Intel.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#36

Post by koolba »

rb808 wrote: post #19

Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessar…

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.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#37

Post by imtringued »

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.

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.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#38

Post by dman »

daxfohl wrote: post #31
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…

Also, end of Moore's law, slowing down the upgrade cycle and making CPU more of a commodity business. I'll add a caveat to (d) because distributed can also mean distributed across cores, and whoever handles that the best gets a strong differentiator.

That is a good point.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#39

Post by viraptor »

rb808 wrote: post #19

Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessar…

> Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow

Most recent ARM PCs were explicitly low-power low-performance. That was the goal, not a description of the architecture. The mobile part pretty much confirms that.

The ARM chips that Amazon is putting in the servers is nothing like what you'll find in a consumer arm laptop.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#40

Post by cesarb »

nordsieck wrote: post #14
devhwrng wrote: post #5

The pricing level for the ARM instances should be interesting. If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in.

> 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…

> Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source.

Being distributed as source code does not mean the source code is not architecture-specific. A lot of software has SIMD-optimized code paths, and it's common for these SIMD code paths to target SSE2 as the least common denominator (since AMD included SSE2 as part of the baseline of its 64-bit evolution of Intel's 32-bit architecture, every 64-bit AMD or Intel CPU on the market will have at least SSE2), so they have to be ported to NEON. And that's before considering things like JIT or FFI code.

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