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Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
- mtgx 10y agoHopefully it will be the the first to offer the much cheaper AMD Ryzen/Naples, too.
- stuckagain 10y agoHow much confidence do you have that Rev. A Ryzen parts will even work?
- Cyph0n 10y agoThat's a bit too extreme, don't you think? Disliking AMD is one thing, but claiming that the entire initial run of an AMD processor might be faulty is just silly. My guess is that you have no idea how much effort goes into verification and testing of something as complex as a microprocessor. A significant chunk of NRE costs goes into verification and test AFAIK.
- fixermark 10y agoIn fairness, there's precedent. Though that was the FPUs in Intel processors, not AMD. So it's not very good precedent.
- Cyph0n 10y agoIntel's FDIV bug was an outlier. Besides, nowadays most of the ISA is implemented in microcode[1]. There are two advantages to this approach: 1) it is much easier to verify the microcode unit (it's simpler/smaller), and 2) it allows CPU vendors to "fix" ISA implementation issues post-release by issuing microcode updates. [1]: ISA => microcode is equivalent in some respects to C => LLVM IR
- mtanski 10y agoOutlier? I would say uncommon but not an outlier. Here's a non-exhaustive list. http://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs http://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs There was also an issue with transaction memory with both Haswel & Broadwell. The fix was to disable TSX support via micro code update. I wouldn't call disabling a fix personally. I doubt Intel even compensated the folks who bought it for the TSX support.
- Cyph0n 10y agoGiven how many Intel/AMD/etc. CPU releases there have been, I would still refer to such glaring implementation bugs as outliers.
- puzzle 10y agoYeah, that list is far from exhaustive. Years and years ago, Google's websearch cluster validation suite found a tricky bug that isn't on that list. The exchange with the CPU manufacturer was amusing.
- bonzini 10y agoMost of the ISA may be implemented in microcode, but the parts that matter are certainly not microcoded! For example the TLB access and the fast path of the TLB miss are not microcoded. You only get to microcode if you have to set an accessed bit or a dirty bit, or if there is a page fault.
- CthulhuOvermind 10y agoAround 80-85% is the projected cost of Verification and Validation (pre/post - Silicon). This is what historical data shows for us (as a CPU design firm doing ARMV8)
- ComputerGuru 10y agoNot really. AMD's Phenom was a flop and the initial batch had a horrible TLB bug. Their FX processors were also hugely hyped and hugely disappointing.
- Cyph0n 10y agoOP said "will [they] even work?". That's a very different thing from a TLB bug. Although I concede that depending on the nature of the TLB bug, it may lead to a significant performance hit. Regarding your criticisms of AMD's past processors, are you coming at this from a consumer standpoint, or are you just disappointed with their architecture and/or implementation? I ask because the Phenom II seems quite loved by its users[1], and the FX series was also quite good for its price. I had a FX-8320 in my last PC and it was quite a capable CPU in my opinion, and many others seem to agree[2]. [1]: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681910... [2]: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113285 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...
- stuckagain 10y agoFor datacenter operators there is no difference between "performance is so crippled that the TCO doesn't pencil out" and "does not work." No difference at all.
- stuckagain 10y agoMy guess is you haven't been in this business long enough to comment. Rev. A AMD "Barcelona" parts did not work in any meaningful way. They all had to be thrown out. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246780-28-issues-stop-ship-order-opterons-errata-cripples http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246780-28-issues-stop-ship...
- wmf 10y agoHow much confidence do you have that Rev. A Skylake parts fully work? http://semiaccurate.com/2016/12/27/intel-cut-skylake-epearly-purley/ http://semiaccurate.com/2016/12/27/intel-cut-skylake-epearly... (apologies in advance for the tease)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoDon't you worry. The reverend A. Ryzen will deliver us from Intel's tyranny with his fiery sermons on single threaded cost-per-compute.
- nickpeterson 10y agoAny idea on Naples timeframe for retail? I'm hoping to build a small workstation in a few months and 32 cores sounds like it might let me browse hacker news faster.
- tankenmate 10y agoNot sure about Naples, but Ryzen is only being released on 8/16 c/t, and other lesser variants will be released in about 3~4 months. AMD said in January that Naples will release H1 2017. The Naples release cadence will be similar?
- snuxoll 10y agoThe 32c/64t part is the only one AMD is talking about, so I'm guessing it will be like the Ryzen Client launch - release the big chips first and then work your way down. All signs point to Naples being released in Q2, hopefully not in the way that "Q1" for Ryzen Client meaning near the end of the quarter :/
- mtgx 10y agoQ2, or Q3 at the latest I think.
- mikecb 10y agoI think it's funny that big Xeon upgrades seem to always occur approximately 8 months after big Power architecture blog posts.
- boulos 10y agoIt's been awesome to see our Skylakes rolling in over the past several weeks. I personally have been waiting nearly 10 years for AVX-512 ever since playing with LRBni. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped a bit in our Skylake work).
- seehafer 10y agoPlease relay back to your team that the moment you get Postgres for your Cloud SQL product you'll get a lot of AWS converts.
- boulos 10y agoPlease come to NEXT in two weeks! (https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com). Most of the registration becomes credits :).
- bitmapbrother 10y agoSounds like an upcoming Postgres announcement at NEXT :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rattray 10y agoOut of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?
- forgot-my-pw 10y agoGCP is generally cheaper than AWS.
- beisner 10y agoIt's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.
- kierank 10y agoAre these E5-skylakes?
- boulos 10y ago"Yes", most systems are Google, including those in Cloud, are dual socket. [Edit: To be clear, we're not sharing the SKU, but this is a real server-class Xeon]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- ppoint 10y agoAre E5 Skylakes available exclusively to Google? Can't find E5 v5 on Intel's site: http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors.
- codinghorror 10y agoPurley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and higher so Google must have early access to it. Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets.. Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.
- ppoint 10y agoThanks!
- boulos 10y agoWe announced with Intel back in November that we would be getting early access to Skylake [1]. Today's announcement is that we're ready to let more people in the door. [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-Google-Compute-Engine-VMs-with-Intels-next-generation-Custom-Cloud-Xeon-Processor.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-G...
- bonzini 10y agoE3 is not a server SKU, it's meant for workstations and it's more similar to i7 than E5. It lacks various features including ECC RAM which, I suppose, is a no-starter for cloud hosting. Also some virtualization capabilities are missing, notably accelerated interrupt injection (APICv+posted interrupts).
- chaosfox 10y ago>In our own internal tests, it improved application performance by up to 30%. this post would have been interesting if they had included those tests.
- boulos 10y agoThis is from our own internal workloads, including things related to Search. If you run say specint_rate2006 (as Intel did for Haswell to Broadwell [1]), you'll see even higher results. We just wanted to call out that even for our own internal benchmarks, these things are seriously great (and we don't make much use of vectorization!). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. [1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeon-e5-v4/xeon-e5-v4-enterprise-general-compute.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...
- timdorr 10y agoJust for reference, since you don't choose your processor explicitly on GCP, but instead choose your zone with homogenous processors, here is their current processor/zone layout: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones#available https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-... Since some GCP engineers are watching: Presumably we'll see some new zones to provide these processors, or will it be a limited release within existing zones? And if so, will you be moving away from homogenous zones in the future?
- boulos 10y agoGood question! We've made it possible for this whitelisted (Alpha) to let you make sure you're creating Skylakes. We'll hopefully have more details to share at NEXT in a few weeks (or immediately if you sign up!). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- ajaimk 10y agoBothers me a bit with "32 cores" listed when they are 16 core/32 Thread machines.
- boulos 10y agoI try to consistently say "vCPUs", but yeah...
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- lightedman 10y agoI'd rather wait for Ryzen. You won't know which Skylake processor you're getting - the gimped one or the non-gimped one. AMD tends to keep their features consistent across the line.
- zbjornson 10y agoWhat do you mean by "gimped?" As in the consumer chips without AVX512 vs. the server chips with AVX512?
- lightedman 10y agoYea, meanwhile AMD tends to keep the features across both desktop and server lines of CPU the same. And the pre-release Skylake server procs seems to be gimped as it's missing a few features versus the actual official release Skylake server procs.
- reitzensteinm 10y agoDepends on the workload. A compute bound vectorizable problem could be four times faster on Skylake.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoDoes Google provide machines with AMD processors?
- boulos 10y ago
- zbjornson 10y agoI've been benchmarking these against Haswell and Broadwells. Despite being 300 MHz slower, we're getting between 5 and 45% faster benchmarks on linear algebra functions that we run a lot, even without doing much work to tailor to AVX512 instructions yet. The cache is also a whopping 56 MB.
- boulos 10y agoHi Zach! Are you using MKL at all under the hood (either through numpy, scipy, etc.) or is that just from AVX2 running much better clock-for-clock on Skylake? Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- zbjornson 10y agoNo MKL, just a mix of AVX2 and a bit of AVX512 written with intrinsics in C++. Working on benchmarking Eigen at the moment, which is also AVX512-optimized.
- alfalfasprout 10y agoNot using Google Cloud but Intel just released MKL 2017 Update 2 today that automatically dispatches AVX512 code on supported Xeon CPUs. Doing a quick comparison between our Haswell servers and Skylake servers we do see a nice little speed bump of ~10-20% on matrix heavy code. The bump is negligible for most other things.
- eloff 10y agoStill limited to a measly 208gb of RAM? That was pretty good back in the day, but now my desktop workstation has 128gb. AWS offers up to 488gb on their latest R4 instances, and 2tb on their X1 instances released a year ago.
- boulos 10y agoFrom the November post [1]: > You'll be able to use the new processor with Compute Engine’s standard, highmem, highcpu and custom machine types. We also plan to continue to introduce bigger and better VM instance types that offer more vCPUs and RAM for compute- and memory-intensive workloads. [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-Google-Compute-Engine-VMs-with-Intels-next-generation-Custom-Cloud-Xeon-Processor.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-G...
- johansch 10y agoI would be quite nice if they actually advertised the particular type of CPU core you rent, rather than some abstract unit of computation. Or at least some kind of performance baseline.
- boulos 10y agoWe do! As mentioned up thread, each zone (today) has a consistent CPU platform: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones#available https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-... For example, in us-west1-a, you're getting a 2.2 GHz base clock E5 Broadwell. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- johansch 10y agoBrilliant!
- Cyph0n 10y agoOh, so now I can't voice my opinion until I've been "in the business" for x amount of years? Yeah, nice try. Another commenter already brought that issue up, but thanks for pointing it out again. I still think that it's quite silly to claim that Ryzen Rev. A may end up being a paperweight based on a mistake that took place a decade ago. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. And from what I read, it seems like it was an extreme edge case, so the TLB error was triggered only during specific workloads. Sucks to be AMD back then.
- stuckagain 10y agoAll I'm saying is it would be better if you knew what you were talking about. AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years.
- Cyph0n 10y ago> AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a second that a large CPU vendor like AMD would delegate verification to "its customers". It's like saying that Boeing just builds planes and tells airlines to make sure they fly correctly before allowing passengers to board them.
- dang 10y ago> You have no idea what you're talking about This is uncivil and not ok on HN. Please take time to edit this kind of swipe out of your comments here.
- Cyph0n 10y agoSeriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way in response to the parent's tone. Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and was quite civil in my opinion. I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.
- jscipione 10y agoWhy is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular set of needs?
- brianwawok 10y agoYes it's in the article.
- acdha 10y agoYour wording on this seems unnecessarily harsh: the article mentions AVX-512 but doesn't go into much detail about that or mention anything else. Some people may immediately know that their code will benefit from AVX-512 but that's only relevant to a subset of workloads.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- boulos 10y agoSkylake is an amazing upgrade, more so than even the Haswell bump. Beyond just the clock-for-clock kind of improvements, AVX512 is a huge win for many vectorized workloads (see my other comment about waiting nearly 10 years for it...). Linear algebra (or ML if you prefer), rendering, and even string operations (operating on 512-bits per instruction is a win over 256) are all a lot faster.
- ctz 10y agoNo mention of SGX; a major Skylake feature for cloud computing. Is it enabled? Is it accessible?
- bonzini 10y agoThey use KVM, and considering that not even host support is available on mainline Linux, I doubt so. It would also be mentioned in the article if it were.
- chillydawg 10y agoSide question: are these extensions available in the desktop (i7) parts? Wanting to test out some optimisations for some code I have.
- zbjornson 10y agoNope, only on Xeons.
- stuckagain 10y agoI have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
- grzm 10y agoYou, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole. No matter how ignorant someone else may be, it's never okay on HN to use uncivil language like this. Your comment stands just fine without it.
- Cyph0n 10y ago> I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. Man, if you had said this along with your previous comment, we wouldn't be having this argument. Remember, this is the internet, where everyone is a self-made expert. I guess that I've grown accustomed to the "guilty until proven innocent" approach. So you are saying that AMD doesn't verify its designs in-house? Is your information recent, or has it been some time since you worked there? Because I looked up verification jobs after I read your other comment, and it seems like they are actively hiring testing and verification engineers. > You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole. Nah, I'm typing on my keyboard.
- dang 10y agoThis violates the HN guidelines egregiously. If you do it again we will ban you. The rules don't change when someone else doesn't know what they're talking about. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725976 and marked it off-topic.
- jhgg 10y agoI wonder if Skylake would offer a material improvement for our workload. We don't necessarily use AVX-512, but we do use a heck of a lot of CPU resources on the current architecture. We are a python/elixir shop. Great job GCP team!
- Mo3 10y agoHahaha. Meanwhile I've been running 2 machines with Skylake and a combined 24 cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 6x512G SSDs, unmetered 1Gbit/s public and 2,5Gbit/s internal for over half a year for a combined $150 total, in complete privacy and in full control of my hosts.. go dedicated, people.
- boulos 10y agoThe consumer Skylakes are not even in the same league as what we're announcing today. The easiest analogy is comparing a laptop to a beefy two-socket server. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and of course want you to pay us to use Skylake)
- Mo3 10y agoWell, we're talking Xeon E5. I frankly don't care if your stuff is 20% faster because I would pay at least 5 times the amount I do now on GCE and the hosts are not under my control. I could get 8 more cores for the price of one of your cores.
- xorblurb 10y ago> want you to pay us to use Skylake I already use a nice E3 Skylake workstation at work, thank you very much. Could be an E5 or a big i7 with more cores (I just rechecked on ark and I guess it's still not available publicly for Skylake, but I also guess this can not held for very long...), but we want it to be close to our product target, which is an E3, so E3 it is. For tons of practical purposes, lots of reasonable E5 are comparable to what you can get with the biggest i7 -- and during the last gen for tons of practical purposes gen to next gen comparable CPU have only progressed slightly. Of course there are workloads where you want to use the most insane CPU, or some CPU with new features / better perf in some niche workload, and so over, but when you start to have such advanced needs I doubt a little that OTS platform solutions are better for the majority of people with highly advanced needs... But yeah, on the mass of people, some will remain interested by "your" solution. Meaning mainly Intel solution, given how you advertise Skylake soo much...
- bdcravens 10y ago
- gcp 10y agoWhenever I want to try GCP, during signup I get stuck at "Account type Business" and the need to enter a VAT number. It hints there's Individual Accounts, but I see no way how to set it to that?
- boulos 10y agoThe issue is VAT in each country in the EU (which I assume you're based in). We don't (currently) collect VAT, but as businesses are required to represent that they'll pay it in their home countries, we can allow you to use it as a business. It pains me (and others) deeply that we "block" individuals like this, but that's how it is today. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- ssambros 10y agoI think if you are trying to create a trial account while being logged in into your personal Google account, it should give you that option. disclaimer: personal opinion. I work at Google but not related to this area.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoDid Intel actually enable the TSX extensions in Skylake? If I'm not mistaken, they shipped it in the last couple of generations but disabled it after release. (Something like that?) It's something that I've wanted to play with for sometime. It's cool that GCE has them available as a service.
- flamedoge 10y agomobile chips have them disabled I believe
- blockoperation 10y agoIt's available on my laptop at least: $ egrep '^(model name|microcode)' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz microcode : 0x9e $ egrep -o ' (hle|rtm) ' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2 hle rtm This is a mobile chip and an old stepping (and running the microcode that supposedly addresses the issue, presumably by disabling it on 'bad' chips?), so I'd be surprised if newer chips (especially server ones) didn't have it.
- flamedoge 10y agoHmm TIL. I think newer ones had an errata (or many) and Intel decided it wasn't worth fixing. Disappointing, but meh.. it is probably true that not many people use Tmem on laptops.
- boulos 10y agoThere are a few threads asking about various features (SGX, TSX, etc.) so I want to make a top-level comment: we're not ready to share more today (sorry). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoIt's okay you're not ready to share more today, but do you know/have an idea of when you will be?
- qhwudbebd 10y agoAny sign of IPv6 support on the horizon? Slightly embarrassing in 2017...
- compuguy 10y agoHonestly Amazon EC2 just got VPC's with IPv6. My ISP still doesn't have native IPv6 either.
- Johnny555 10y agoAmazon's c5 (Skylake) series shouldn't be far behind... https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-soon-amazon-ec2-c5-instances-the-next-generation-of-compute-optimized-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-so...
- fabrigm 10y agoA Google day is not responsive
- tambourine_man 10y agoConstructive criticism: Your calculator page is unusable on mobile due to fancy "material" form filling. https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
- boulos 10y agoYou are too polite. I've reported this before, and I'd easily add an expletive in front of unusable. Worse, it's not even Viewable on mobile.
- dantiberian 10y agoAlso, the bandwidth calculator seems to be broken, I can't add bandwidth charges for services through the calculator.
- nodesocket 10y agoWould a typical load balancer/web server running NGINX doing SSL termination see an improvement switching to Skylake?
- anonymousDan 10y ago+1 for SGX support. Would be really cool to remotely attest the software you are running in a real-world cloud.