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Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#41

Post by jotm »

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…

Intel didn't care. They dabbled into it with XScale, at a time the best mobile ARM processors, then gave up and sold the whole thing. Shortsighted, should've kept at it.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#42

Post by jotm »

monocasa wrote: post #34
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

TDP of Intel chips like the PXA270, amirite

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#43

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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,

The only ARM based PCs I've ever seen are the Raspberry Pi and other products intended to compete with the Pi, and one of the core features of these PCs is being a complete computer for under $100. Keeping the price low was always the top priority, not performance.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#44

Post by rsynnott »

monocasa wrote: post #20
PHGamer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung has Exynos however, due to Qualcomm and patents you don't ever see their phones equipped with it here in America.

I mean, now you don't. But earlier cellphones hadn't integrated the baseband yet so it was a moot point either way. Still not seeing how Samsung followed Apple in SoC design when Apple started by using Samsung SoCs.

Apple followed Samsung in SoC design, but Samsung (in 2016) followed Apple (2011) in core design. I expect that’s what they’re getting at.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#45

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Amazon doesn’t have to offer ARM based CPU instances to customers to benefit. If it just runs it own offerings on ARM like the servers that run load balancers, SNS, SQS, etc where they control the software they can save a lot of money.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

koolba wrote: post #36
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.

RISC-V chips will handily beat ARM on performance per watt, given similar specs and fabrication technology. The margin is not insanely large but it's definitely substantial in existing benchmarks.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#47

Post by jonstewart »

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 processors. ARM held on just long enough in the low margin embedded world to then conquer mobile. Intel was able to win price/performance through superior fabrication and economies of scale, but power/performance really does require a superior design.

If Intel recovers, it may need to jettison x86, or offload x86 interpretation to a secondary unit for desktop processor with it gone from server procs.

This would make me happy because it’s been crushing to think I might go my entire career/lifetime with little endian processors being the mainstream. :-/

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#48

Post by tverbeure »

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…

All the software on the Linux server farm of my company that truly matters for my job is extremely expensive proprietary binary-only software.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#49

Post by tverbeure »

zozbot234 wrote: post #30
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.

How many of those "precompiled binaries" are truly performance critical? If it's just a single component, you can run it in qemu-user mode and still come out ahead overall.

How many of those precompiled binaries are performance critical? How about all?

From the software that runs for hours to compile a model, the software that calculates results, to the interactive analysis software that needs to load GBs of data.

The whole reason to run these things on a server farm is that you need large and fast machines that are better shared to make sure they get optimal use of the machine and of the license pool.

Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

#50

Post by dman »

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…

This space will be interesting to watch! We live in extremely interesting times hardware wise.
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