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why do you think amazon did not do the exact same things, before they accumulated years of baggage?
by gcb0 11y ago
why do you think amazon did not do the exact same things, before they accumulated years of baggage?
- boulos 11y agoThere's a real trade off. I didn't mean to dismiss it (apologies if it came across that way). For some workloads, a 2.3 GHz Haswell runs absolute circles around a 2.5 GHz Sandy Bridge (mostly vectorization friendly ones). So if you care about newer architectures, now the API either needs to let you choose a processor type per zone (painful) or you end up taking it on as the provider (each zone has a single processor type). We also elect to maintain single-threaded performance across a variety of benchmarks which is a double-edged sword. So they made a different choice: let the customer just decide explicitly. We went with "let the customer decide if they want". Most people internally at Google don't bother and I'd say we've been proven correct in the marketplace as well; if you need to care, we're transparent (otherwise, who cares!).