What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk, network, power...
AWS is running on very thin margins, and every couple precent in extra productivity could easily mean doubling profits.
Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
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Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except MIPS and the network.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
ARM has never enjoyed a Op/J advantage over x86. They have low-power designs, yes, but they don’t do more work for a given amount of energy. x86 won fair and square. The risc people failed to foresee that instruction density would be extremely important to performance. Intel didn’t beat them with physics. CISC is just fundamentally better.
I had assumed the opposite, that ARM was better in terms of Op/J. Can you provide a reference to make it certain? Also, I wonder if the low density of RISC could be countered by introducing execution of compressed/zipped machine code. Some compressors like brotli are highly tuned to the expected type of data to be compressed and are very compact. All entry points to basic blocks in the code are generally known at com…
Arm Thumb is a compressed ISA. Intel has been decompressing x86 instructions into an internal RISC machine since the Pentium Pro. The benefit is getting more instructions through the chokepoint from DRAM to L1 cache.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#94What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk, network, power...
AWS is running on very thin margins, and every couple precent in extra productivity could easily mean doubling profits.
> AWS is running on very thin margins
Incorrect. Amazon is a public company, and their own report tells us that AWS margin is 25%, as of 2019 Q3.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Is this the archetypal AWS customer that drives the majority of intel’s sales to AMZN? That not only has lock-in with a closed source vendor, but that vendor is not agile enough to give ARM binaries for AWS workloads? Doubtful IMO. Maybe for EDA and CAD/CAM setups, but somehow I doubt those are enough to keep Intel as we know them afloat. Intel has huge reason to fear ARM on the server.
I was thinking about server farms in general, not AWS specifically. You’re probably right that AWS-type server are more likely to skew towards software that is available in source form.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#96Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#97Whatever happened with the Qualcomm Centriq ARM based server CPU? It never became available at any reasonable price in small quantities for software development/test/prototyping as something you could actually buy an ATX motherboard + CPU together and install (redhat, centos, debian, freebsd, whatever) on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-... h…
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?
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#98Earlier 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…
"They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
...I'm not sure it was before the Pentium though, because it appears they both came out in 1993.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to pr…
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 advantages too (cooling?) that partially make up for the longer more complex core->core latencies.
Re: Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
#100Its 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.