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SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

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Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#61

Post by rnrn »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #60
lvl155 wrote: post #56

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time. https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

I assume the question is why AMD is not making EPYC or Ryzen processors with Arm cores for the application processors.

AMD continuing to have the Xilinx line of FPGAs with some Cortex cores and having Arm management cores that run firmware doesn’t really address this.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#62

Post by Twirrim »

terinjokes wrote: post #34
jjtheblunt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.

They also won't provide any guarantees about components continuing to work, such as booting over thunderbolt that some clouds rely on. There's an awful lot of financial risk in providing MacOS as a service.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#63

Post by rnrn »

lvl155 wrote: post #56

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

I don’t think x86 as an ISA is necessarily declining much and AMD has products with zen4c / zen5c compact cores intended to compete with Arm server products. AMD doesn’t have to pay licensing / royalties for x86 AFAIK and probably would prefer to keep x86 and not start paying arm and creating any adoption barrier form a change of ISA (however small) if they can make competitive x86 cores.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#64

Post by Twirrim »

dvdkon wrote: post #38
jjtheblunt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

In addition to the problems other people have pointed out, it just doesn't have comparable specs to something like Ampere's Altra or AMD's Epyc. 24 CPU cores and 192 GB of memory might be enough for a small company's single on-site server, but those will likely want lots of storage and not want to deal with an exotic platform. Anyone who's willing to deal with ARM and macOS on a server will likely want a lot more per…

Agreed. Rack density is the biggest thing once you get away from "a handful of servers", be it CPU, memory, or storage density.

Side note: I'm curious where this 1:8 ratio of cores:memory came from. Everyone seems to be standardising on it, even at VM levels

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#65

Post by robbiet480 »

terinjokes wrote: post #34
jjtheblunt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.

Apple has a BMC on the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It's called Lights Out Management (LOM). https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-manage...

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#66

Post by everfrustrated »

lvl155 wrote: post #56

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

Because people are (mass generalisation) mostly only buying Arm to save money over x86. For AMD to get into Arm would be to kill their profit margins. Same curse that Intel had.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#67

Post by pjmlp »

twoodfin wrote: post #42
bayindirh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Oracle's tendency to use pillows on processor architectures and bury them at night, Softbank is possibly the better of two evils? Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.

I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition. They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time. Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud. One wonder…

Which is a pity, given that Solaris SPARC has been doing hardware memory tagging in production for a decade now.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#68

Post by myself248 »

ksynwa wrote: post #28

TIL .softbank is a TLD now

Opening up TLDs beyond the originals and CCTLDs completely invalidated assumptions about what domains and domain names should mean. A massive disservice to everyone whose intuition was helping them avoid scams and squatting, but hey, at least a lot of money changed hands.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#70

Post by awongh »

riffraff wrote: post #21
sitkack wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e

perhaps you think this explains something but honestly it does not. I mean, yes, these people are ex-israeli army, but why would Google want to pay 32B for ex-IDF people? Surely there's more of them out there?

They're referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

You can scroll down to see the companies founded by alumni.

The Meta CISO is ex-8200.

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