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Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

419 points by zone411 8y ago

atonse 8y ago
I wanted to try to use an AWS ARM server as a bastion host running Wireguard. But a t2.nano was cheaper. Anyone get it working? (I haven’t tried)
- broknbottle 8y ago
  The t2.nano without unlimited burst credits relies on staying under a usage threshold. Why wireguard over something like sshuttle?
  - kelp 8y ago
    FYI, t3 instances have and option to either be throttld when you exceed your burst credit or just pay more for burst.
    - cthalupa 8y ago
      T2 offers this as well.
      - kelp 8y ago
        Oh you’re right! I’d missed the launch of t2 unlimited. Looks like with t3 they’ve swapped the defaults. T3 now defaults to unlimited, t2 it’s an option.
becauseiam 8y ago
The article misses that months before the ARM announcement, AWS announced AMD based instances being available in m5 and r5 classes, and are cheaper than the default Intel offerings. If anything Intel might be afraid is that because the workloads that can be achieved are comparable.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  AMD are in a great place. TSMC's 7nm is in great shape (unlike Intel's 10nm), and AMD's multi-chip architecture allows them to get vastly better effective yields for high-core-count “chips”. They will be selling superior CPU to Intel's and they will be making them at significantly lower cost, while Intel is struggling to compete, stuck with monolithic chips on 14nm.
  - blackstrips 8y ago
    That said, Intel’s 14nm is very mature though. The yields are likely very good at this point given how long they have been using it. Knowing it inside out also likely allows them to squeeze a little more performance out of it. A pity about their 10nm. Won’t be surprised if they have given up on it by now and have shifted all resources to 7nm. Hopefully 7nm comes online before 14nm completely gives out.
  - stdplaceholder 8y ago
    I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but that’s about it.
    - evancox100 8y ago
      Any public sources? Just curious
      - stdplaceholder 8y ago
        I don't think anyone has an incentive to release findings because that will just sour their future work with AMD and counteract any pricing concessions they are getting for waving the AMD platform around under Intel's noses. Same for POWER, for what that's worth.
comboy 8y ago
This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning. I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.
- adamson 8y ago
  I'm pretty out of the loop here. Are there existing, widely used workloads that are critical for storage for which FPGAs are competitive with CPUs?
  - comboy 8y ago
    I'm just guessing that if the only thing that given box is doing is handling very specific internal S3 API, you can probably optimize a few things over a multi-purpose architecture. I'm totally blue and I'll be honest - when I want to learn about something, it seems that stating some thesis gets me way more information from HN vs asking a question, especially when it turns out to be wrong ;)
    - jawnv6 8y ago
      This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that. Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelerators for AES, and there's better ways to do that than mucking about with the ISA. Do you get folks coming back for a second reply after this charade is made apparent?
      - uncoder0 8y ago
        Only replying to the claim of disrespect. I think the disclaimer, as included, in a post positing a thesis is not disrespectful at all. gp clearly laid out that they were not an expert but had an assumption. I will agree though that done without a disclaimer gp would have been disrespectful.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company." Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC. I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. That said, the interesting thing about this article is that given Intel's margins, a company like Amazon feels they can take on the huge cost of integrating a CPU, support chips, and related components to achieve $/CPU-OP margins that are better than letting Intel or AMD eat all of that design and validation expense. This sort of move by Amazon and AMD's move to aggressively price the EPYC server chips, really puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Intel.
- projektfu 8y ago
  I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.
  - hbosch 8y ago
    > but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. The implication is that Amazon is everyone's datacenter.
  - Despegar 8y ago
    Well I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain. The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. So while Apple may never sell their chips to anyone, Amazon may decide to enter the merchant chip business (if they decide it's not a competitive advantage). Maybe they wouldn't sell it to Microsoft or Google, but certainly other companies that they don't compete with that operate their own servers (Facebook). And then Intel would really be losing volume.
40acres 8y ago
Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips, but if they display competency they'll certainly be able to squeeze more out of Intel.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them. And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.
- btian 8y ago
  But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale. I don't see why they would fail this time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - abfan1127 8y ago
    TSMC can run the masks, but if the design is not sound, then it doesn't matter how good the transistors are. Power islands, clock domain crossings, proper DFT, DFM, etc. are all needed to get a good design.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process. As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.
imtringued 8y ago
Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up. Yes, I know AWS' target group is small startups and big enterprises who couldn't care less about how much their servers costs them. But at the same time this means switching to a new architecture for meager cost savings isn't attractive to them at all. They are willing to pay a premium if it means that things "just work". As long as this barrier exists ARM servers have zero chance of threatening intel.
- blihp 8y ago
  Because this is just their first generation of chips. Should Amazon stick with it, they will get better at it and costs will come down while performance goes up. This should scare Intel because they have been banking on the data center for future growth. This looks like pretty much their last stand for a place where they can maintain margins. They lost mobile very early on. More recently it's looking like PCs are at risk thanks to competition from AMD. If they start losing their large volume enterprise customers, they'll need to come up with a plan D.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    That might be the first generation under the Amazon brand, but my 3 year old Synology is using an Annapurna CPU; Amazon's chips are built the Annapurna (acquired by Amazon) team.
    - blihp 8y ago
      There's a world of difference between designing a chip for a range of customers (i.e. pre-Amazon acquisition) and designing a chip for one customer. So provided Amazon does a reasonably good job of managing the acquisition, this really should be looked at as first generation (despite however many iterations occurred before the acquisition) since their design constraints (workload/environmental/power/thermal) have likely been altered significantly.
cronix 8y ago
I could almost hear Larry Ellison snickering in the background as I read this. I wonder how much Amazon pays Oracle, anyway? I think in '16 is was around $60M (according to Ellison: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-larry-ellison-challenges-amazon-salesforce-and-workday-on-the-future-of-the-cloud/#62e137513522 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-la... )
- PowerfulWizard 8y ago
  Some more info here: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/
- bgee 8y ago
  may or may not be on-topic: ‘Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software [0]. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-talkin-larry-amazon-is-close-to-tossing-oracle-software?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-tal...
stevespang 8y ago
Why has Intel not started building datacenters and offering data processing services like Amazon and Google ? They obviously have an advantage because they manufacture the chips . . .
ejz 8y ago
Um, and AMD.
j1vms 8y ago
Well, guess Intel's thinking "there's always Microsoft (Azure)." I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Microsoft can compile everything on ARM if they want to. No reason why Azure would be completely stuck on Intel chips.
  - cbsmith 8y ago
    They can compile "everything" that Microsoft has written to ARM. There's a small matter of, you know, all the other stuff.
    - MBCook 8y ago
      Make the server is cheaper and people will use them. It already doesn’t matter for a lot of people. Java? PHP? JS? C#? If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care. Outside of that costs rule the day. If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it. Tons of open source software runs on Windows. Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. So those who could moved.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care. Plenty of compiled language users wouldn't need to care either.
      - cbsmith 8y ago
        So, if you are using an interpreted language, you're indifferent to cost savings enough that savings from running on ARM likely won't make enough to be a differentiator. > If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it. Yeah, I don't think the incentive is as large as you perceive it to be. Few, if any, customers are going to hire back the people they got rid of five years ago to port their old code over to a platform that is 50% cheaper to run, let alone smaller to no existent savings. But that's kind of missing the simpler problem though: there's a reason beyond form factor that the ARM version of Windows has limited features/offerings... > Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. Actually, with three year reserved instances, the pricing is largely the same in Azure.
kev009 8y ago
Yawn, the amount of publicity ARM gets for free for the past decade to enter the data center is perplexing. The economy of these designs are not good versus the competition full stop. There are three chips that work well in the data center: EPYC, Xeon, and POWER. All of these are billion dollar designs. Nothing about the ARM ecosystem supports designing to these same constraints or spending that amount of money to enter this space seriously.
twoodfin 8y ago
Pretty funny to see “Dave Patterson” described as “a Google chip specialist”!
- cbsmith 8y ago
  I was like, "is that the same Dave Patterson?", and then thinking about Google & typical tech journalism I realized, "yeah, of course it is".
Solar19 8y ago
Why ARM though? The article touts how this is a homegrown chip, and Amazon obviously has the resources to build a truly homegrown, optimized CPU. Why use ARM instead and import all of its idiosyncrasies? I guess I could ask the question more broadly. Why does every company that "designs its own chip" use ARM instead of designing its own ISA? How much work does it save? How much optimization does it forsake? I'm reminded of John Regehr's post on discovering the optimal instruction set: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669
- pcwalton 8y ago
  It's not just the ISA that you get when you license from ARM: it's the entire HDL source. If you go even further and get an architecture license, you also get a whole bunch of fundamental technical documents and a test suite. This saves a ton of time. There's the issue of software compatibility. Writing a port of Linux—kernel and userland—is a ton of work. And if you have other chips on board, such as a GPU, the only drivers available may be ARM-only binary blobs. There might be an entire ecosystem of ARM software you have to keep supporting (which is one reason why Apple doesn't [yet] design their own ISA). RISC-V has a small chance of commoditizing some of this stuff someday, but not yet.
- twtw 8y ago
  > how much work does it save? Really a lot of work. Software compatibility and availability will make or break a processor. Unless you own the entire stack and are willing to deal with the struggles of a custom ISA, nobody wants to make a new one - the benefits probably aren't that great.
  - kelp 8y ago
    This can't be overstated for a cloud provider, especially one like AWS that wants to run everything for everyone. ARM has good OS and compiler support, and if you want people to move some workloads off x86 to another architecture, you're gonna want that migration to be as painless as possible.
- justincormack 8y ago
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Apologies in advance for the layperson question: It's my understanding that a lot of CPU gains come from caching. That suggests to me that there is potential performance to be gained by caching across a larger number of machines. Is that something Amazon could do here? Somehow connect all their machines and cache in a huge space? Maybe individual physical machines would be more like a front end for a cache space, and when I get an Amazon instance, it's actually a "virtual" CPU that pieces together instructions that are mostly already cached in various places throughout the network? Is that even theoretically possible, or is it total fantasy?
- rblatz 8y ago
  Cache is insanely fast, orders of magnitude faster than ram, and basically instant compared to going to disk or another machine on the network. I would find it unlikely that they could overcome the added network latency introduced in such a system. Edit: check this out for more info https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...
  - sharpneli 8y ago
    And to give the 1ns L1 access time some physicality. During 1 nanosecond light in vacuum travels 30 centimeters, or 12 inches. Signals in conductors travel slower. It is ridiculously short amount of time. This means that there will absolutely never* be anything that can give faster access that is going to be farther than that from the CPU. Or more specifically half of that distance as the message to request what part of the cache to read must travel to the cache itself. * Unless we find out FTL is possible. But it's a rather safe bet to assume no.
- Merad 8y ago
  I'm going by memory here, but IIRC the fastest level of CPU cache (L1) can be accessed in about 2 nanoseconds. Even the slowest level (L3) operates on the order of a few hundred nanoseconds. RAM is slow by comparison, and network latency is so much slower it's basically glacial.
- 8y ago
trumped 8y ago
an amazon chip would be the last thing I would want to buy seeing how awful their tablets are....
mmaunder 8y ago
Amazon sell compute to the world. This is vertical integration and makes sense at a certain scale. That scale has to be massive, but they appear to have reached it. They may have chosen to execute sooner if they also plan to sell the chips to hardware vendors like Dell and the financials check out.
maddyboo 8y ago
Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom. For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to silicon to firmware to OS to ecosystem. They have very little incentive to interoperate with external organizations via open standards because they own many of the pieces which need to be interoperable. Thus, they can force users and developers to use their tooling, the applications they approve of, dictate what code will run on their platform, and how easily you can inspect, modify, or repair their products. This is all to say, it is easy to imagine a future where all performance-competitive technology is entirely built upon proprietary, locked down stacks – AND – it will be at a level of complexity and specificity that independent people simply cannot gain access to the ability to create competitive solutions. It could be back to the days of the mainframe, but worse, where only the corporations who create the technology will have access to the knowledge and tools to experiment and innovate on a competitive scale. Amazon wants developers to build solutions entirely on top of their platform using closed source core components. They also want to control the silicon their own platform runs on. In 10 years, what else will they own, how much will this effect the freedom offered by competitors, and what impact will it all have on our freedom to build cool shit?
- reikonomusha 8y ago
  For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX. Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for. With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.
plinkplonk 8y ago
(Tangential) What I'd really like to see is a competitor to Google's TPU that I can actually buy (vs rent on the cloud)
- DeathArrow 8y ago
  Check here: https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100/dp/B076P84525 https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100...
paulie_a 8y ago
Amd has been kicking the shit out of Intel for 30 years. No seemed to notice. Their 386 was faster than Intel 486. The octa core that is tenish years old is still competitive against non Xeon chips. At the time it completely destroyed intela chips for half or less of the price. Intel is doing nothing new and just gliding. They haven't done anything interesting in 20 years, the p4s and rdram were an incredible pile of junk. The itanic.. that says it all It's cute I get a downvoted instead of an actual rebuttal. Amd has been doing great work for a far less price, Intel has been phoning it in for decades, and for a good bit of time making inferior technology.
nickik 8y ago
To bad they are not doing this with RISC-V. Getting a large costumer and high performance implementations would been a great boost. Since this is about vertical integration for them it would make a certain amount of sense.
- DeathArrow 8y ago
  Bad for RISC-V, good for Amazon. RISC-V is in a far less usable state than ARM ISA.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Why would it be bad for RISC-V if a large company invest money and moves workloads to it? Of course RISC-V is not as a far as ARM but if Amazon really had that strategy the ISA would hardly be their primary problem.
kelp 8y ago
I'm by no means an expert in this, and maybe it's a bit obvious, but hadn't seen this mentioned yet. I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs. Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains. The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads. The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages. I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads. I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.) If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal. I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like. It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.
- snaky 8y ago
  > the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads Sure, the cloud is a classical mainframe, and mainframes are famous for using specialized hardware for pretty much everything.
sunstone 8y ago
And Amazon is not alone. Other potential candidates to add to list include AMD, Apple and Qualcomm. Maybe a few others that don't come to mind right away.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
Open Source will never be able to continously supply bleeding edge hardware and software - its is however able to specify data transfer standards, that have to be upheld to prevent lock in of customers. It should do that.
skybrian 8y ago
You might compare this with Google's partnership with IBM, using POWER chips in their data centers. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-centers-now-have-ibm-inside.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-cente...
ksec 8y ago
Designing an ARM Chip from ARM blueprint and TSMC is relatively simple and cheap for Amazon. And there is enough market and hype to justify the investment as they will probably break even within 24 months. It has become obvious that Intel isn't really willing to lower price that affect margin and sales. So Amazon needs to make a statement to Intel to say they have lots of options, EPYC and ARM. I don't want to hype Zen 2 / EPYC 2, but I do think it will be very competitive. And that is a Threat to Intel. And fundamentally, the REAL threat is neither ARM, AMD or even RSIC-V, it is TSMC.
acqq 8y ago
The article is non technical. For those who search for that: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton_specs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton... "Semiconductor industry watcher David Schor shared SciMark and C-Ray benchmarks for the 16-core Graviton. In the SciMark testing, the AWS system-on-chip was twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on Linux 4.14." http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI ""It does well on the Phoronix Test Suite," he said. "It does poorly benchmarking our website fully deployed on it: Nginx + PHP + MediaWiki, and everything else involved. This is your 'real world' test. All 16 cores can't match even 5 cores of our Xeon E5-2697 v4."" "The system-on-chips use a mix of Arm's data-center-friendly Neoverse technology, and Annapurna's in-house designs. The 16 vCPU instances are arranged in four quad-core clusters with 2MB of shared L2 cache per cluster, and 32KB of L1 data cache, and 48KB of L1 instruction cache, per core. One vCPU maps to one physical core."
aneutron 8y ago
They're ignoring the fact that it's not even the same ISA, not even the same use cases or maturity for these ISAs, and that for them to actually produce a x86 chip, the only way to do that is to licence either AMD or Intel as IIRC they're the only ones to hold the x86 patent. That or change the way a majority of the software stack was written for the past 15 years.
- gpderetta 8y ago
  A lot of the software stack was rewritten in the past 10 year to make sure that it would work well on ARM though. ARM itself contributed to the effort.
DeathArrow 8y ago
It's not exactly a threat. Amazon use cortex A72 in their CPUs and there's no way they can replace most Intel CPUs with that. The performance isn't there.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  It looks they are after the uses where an Intel server-grade CPU is overkill. If an A72 solves my problem and is cheaper than the cheapest x86 I can get, A72 it'll be. ARM servers are very useful for low base loads. If the demand gets higher, there is no reason not to spin up a couple x86's to take the load off the ARM boxes.
- simonh 8y ago
  The threat is the potential for this to encroach on Intel's territory in the future, not necessarily this specific chip. The article makes this clear by opening with talk of a 'new line of work' and 'going the do-it-yourself route'. This is about the trend, not the moment and I thought they did a good job clearly framing it that way.
- ptman 8y ago
  There are workloads where I/O and RAM dominate
novaRom 8y ago
In the near future we will see more and more chips coming from Asia. Not just final silicon production, test, and packaging, but also complete hardware design. They will produce GPUs, FPGAs, and CPUs of all classes. Look how many students in Computer Design, Digital Design, Electrical Engineering graduate every single year. Multiply that by low costs with high productivity and you will find Silicon Valley will face a very strong competitor.
- yonkshi 8y ago
  I think we will also see proportionally more and more chips coming out of US companies as well. When Google started their own chips (TPUs), they just kickstarted a vertical integration race amongst the tech giants. Apple, Intel, Nvidia were the old players, Google is dipping their toes in with TPU, now Amazon and probably soon Microsoft and FB. I think overall we will see more chips from both Asia and US
  - evancox100 8y ago
    Microsoft has been doing custom silicon longer than either Google or Amazon, as a part of the Xbox security-related functionality I believe. And then other consumer products like Hololens, custom pen ASIC in Surface, etc. Now Azure Sphere (more so giving away silicon IP to others, but still have their fingers in it.) Edit: All this in addition to their widespread and well documented usage of FPGAs for Azure network offload and Bing acceleration.
fareesh 8y ago
How does competition work with regard to trade secrets like chip design etc? If I hire the top dogs at a chip maker and they design a similar chip for my company from memory, how is this prevented from happening?
- wmf 8y ago
  There are patents and non-competes in some states but basically nothing prevents it. Silicon Valley exists because of the cycle of engineers leaving established companies to start startups (or now, leaving established companies to go to companies that are branching out into every area possible).
  - fareesh 8y ago
    Would patenting the chip design also expose the very secret that is being guarded? So someone in China could just read the patent and make the same thing, is that right?
    - wmf 8y ago
      Some companies patent all their ideas, including the ones they don't use. This creates a chaff effect where you can't be sure which ideas you should copy. There are certainly trade secrets that aren't patented but the whole point is that they aren't protected as much.
karakanb 8y ago
Truly lame question, is there any possibility for Amazon or other cloud providers to monitor the executed instructions and their distribution? Could this allow more optimized architectures for specific loads, or would this not bring any actual benefit?
srinikoganti 8y ago
This is oversimplification. Binary compatibility, of millions of third party libraries out there, is the biggest hurdle. How many years did it take to switch from Python 2.7 to Python 3 ? AWS lockin is a bigger threat. I prefer to keep my binaries cloud agnostic and X86 and X64 compatible rather than AWS only code or even ARM binary. By the way what happened to Amazon phones ?
- leowoo91 8y ago
  What is worrying me more is that we are all stuck on idea of being locked-in to any vendor. Why can't we focus on innovation instead? Take Instagram for e.g. they started with AWS right? Then moved on the real hardware within few weeks (if I remember correctly) after acquisition. I understand, cost of the unseen problems are high, but it might be good idea to remember it also much depends on delivering speed.
StreamBright 8y ago
Not only Amazon's but Apple's, Jiāngnán's as well. I think Intel really should crank up innovation if they would like to stay competitive.
glenrivard 8y ago
Cloud changes the business dynamics with the chip business. Before a Dell purchased a chip from Intel and sold the server to someone else. Now the companies buying are running the servers. That changes everything. I would expect more and more the chips used to come from the big cloud providers. I would expect once Google gets Zircon further along to build their own CPUs that are optimized for it. I do hope they use RISC-V ISA like they have with the PVC.
mehdix 8y ago
Open source has won the software, however it mostly runs on closed-source and proprietary hardware. Perhaps open hardware is the ultimate answer.
syntaxing 8y ago
I thought Amazon is just licensing a custom design from ARM and manufacturing from TSMC. It's a step in the right direction but it'll be a good amount of years before Amazon has their own Fab making their own chips.
tmaly 8y ago
As much as it is easy to license from ARM and use TSM as a foundry, it does not make much economic sense. Look at Google's purchase of Motorola. They ended up selling Motorola to Lenova. The hardware industry and specifically the chip industry is very specialized. If your code competency is not chip making, it really does not make sense to try to enter the industry.

419 points by zone411 8y ago

I wanted to try to use an AWS ARM server as a bastion host running Wireguard. But a t2.nano was cheaper. Anyone get it working? (I haven’t tried)

broknbottle 8y ago
The t2.nano without unlimited burst credits relies on staying under a usage threshold. Why wireguard over something like sshuttle?
- kelp 8y ago
  FYI, t3 instances have and option to either be throttld when you exceed your burst credit or just pay more for burst.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    T2 offers this as well.
    - kelp 8y ago
      Oh you’re right! I’d missed the launch of t2 unlimited. Looks like with t3 they’ve swapped the defaults. T3 now defaults to unlimited, t2 it’s an option.

becauseiam 8y ago

The article misses that months before the ARM announcement, AWS announced AMD based instances being available in m5 and r5 classes, and are cheaper than the default Intel offerings. If anything Intel might be afraid is that because the workloads that can be achieved are comparable.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
AMD are in a great place. TSMC's 7nm is in great shape (unlike Intel's 10nm), and AMD's multi-chip architecture allows them to get vastly better effective yields for high-core-count “chips”. They will be selling superior CPU to Intel's and they will be making them at significantly lower cost, while Intel is struggling to compete, stuck with monolithic chips on 14nm.
- blackstrips 8y ago
  That said, Intel’s 14nm is very mature though. The yields are likely very good at this point given how long they have been using it. Knowing it inside out also likely allows them to squeeze a little more performance out of it. A pity about their 10nm. Won’t be surprised if they have given up on it by now and have shifted all resources to 7nm. Hopefully 7nm comes online before 14nm completely gives out.
- stdplaceholder 8y ago
  I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but that’s about it.
  - evancox100 8y ago
    Any public sources? Just curious
    - stdplaceholder 8y ago
      I don't think anyone has an incentive to release findings because that will just sour their future work with AMD and counteract any pricing concessions they are getting for waving the AMD platform around under Intel's noses. Same for POWER, for what that's worth.

comboy 8y ago

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning. I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

adamson 8y ago
I'm pretty out of the loop here. Are there existing, widely used workloads that are critical for storage for which FPGAs are competitive with CPUs?
- comboy 8y ago
  I'm just guessing that if the only thing that given box is doing is handling very specific internal S3 API, you can probably optimize a few things over a multi-purpose architecture. I'm totally blue and I'll be honest - when I want to learn about something, it seems that stating some thesis gets me way more information from HN vs asking a question, especially when it turns out to be wrong ;)
  - jawnv6 8y ago
    This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that. Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelerators for AES, and there's better ways to do that than mucking about with the ISA. Do you get folks coming back for a second reply after this charade is made apparent?
    - uncoder0 8y ago
      Only replying to the claim of disrespect. I think the disclaimer, as included, in a post positing a thesis is not disrespectful at all. gp clearly laid out that they were not an expert but had an assumption. I will agree though that done without a disclaimer gp would have been disrespectful.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company." Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC. I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree. That said, the interesting thing about this article is that given Intel's margins, a company like Amazon feels they can take on the huge cost of integrating a CPU, support chips, and related components to achieve $/CPU-OP margins that are better than letting Intel or AMD eat all of that design and validation expense. This sort of move by Amazon and AMD's move to aggressively price the EPYC server chips, really puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Intel.

projektfu 8y ago
I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.
- hbosch 8y ago
  > but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. The implication is that Amazon is everyone's datacenter.
- Despegar 8y ago
  Well I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain. The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. So while Apple may never sell their chips to anyone, Amazon may decide to enter the merchant chip business (if they decide it's not a competitive advantage). Maybe they wouldn't sell it to Microsoft or Google, but certainly other companies that they don't compete with that operate their own servers (Facebook). And then Intel would really be losing volume.

40acres 8y ago

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips, but if they display competency they'll certainly be able to squeeze more out of Intel.

jimbokun 8y ago
But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them. And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.
btian 8y ago
But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale. I don't see why they would fail this time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abfan1127 8y ago
  TSMC can run the masks, but if the design is not sound, then it doesn't matter how good the transistors are. Power islands, clock domain crossings, proper DFT, DFM, etc. are all needed to get a good design.
Nokinside 8y ago
Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process. As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.

imtringued 8y ago

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up. Yes, I know AWS' target group is small startups and big enterprises who couldn't care less about how much their servers costs them. But at the same time this means switching to a new architecture for meager cost savings isn't attractive to them at all. They are willing to pay a premium if it means that things "just work". As long as this barrier exists ARM servers have zero chance of threatening intel.

blihp 8y ago
Because this is just their first generation of chips. Should Amazon stick with it, they will get better at it and costs will come down while performance goes up. This should scare Intel because they have been banking on the data center for future growth. This looks like pretty much their last stand for a place where they can maintain margins. They lost mobile very early on. More recently it's looking like PCs are at risk thanks to competition from AMD. If they start losing their large volume enterprise customers, they'll need to come up with a plan D.
- beagle3 8y ago
  That might be the first generation under the Amazon brand, but my 3 year old Synology is using an Annapurna CPU; Amazon's chips are built the Annapurna (acquired by Amazon) team.
  - blihp 8y ago
    There's a world of difference between designing a chip for a range of customers (i.e. pre-Amazon acquisition) and designing a chip for one customer. So provided Amazon does a reasonably good job of managing the acquisition, this really should be looked at as first generation (despite however many iterations occurred before the acquisition) since their design constraints (workload/environmental/power/thermal) have likely been altered significantly.

cronix 8y ago

I could almost hear Larry Ellison snickering in the background as I read this. I wonder how much Amazon pays Oracle, anyway? I think in '16 is was around $60M (according to Ellison: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-larry-ellison-challenges-amazon-salesforce-and-workday-on-the-future-of-the-cloud/#62e137513522 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-la... )

PowerfulWizard 8y ago
Some more info here: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/
bgee 8y ago
may or may not be on-topic: ‘Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software [0]. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-talkin-larry-amazon-is-close-to-tossing-oracle-software?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-tal...

stevespang 8y ago

Why has Intel not started building datacenters and offering data processing services like Amazon and Google ? They obviously have an advantage because they manufacture the chips . . .

ejz 8y ago

Um, and AMD.

j1vms 8y ago

Well, guess Intel's thinking "there's always Microsoft (Azure)." I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.

stcredzero 8y ago
Microsoft can compile everything on ARM if they want to. No reason why Azure would be completely stuck on Intel chips.
- cbsmith 8y ago
  They can compile "everything" that Microsoft has written to ARM. There's a small matter of, you know, all the other stuff.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    Make the server is cheaper and people will use them. It already doesn’t matter for a lot of people. Java? PHP? JS? C#? If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care. Outside of that costs rule the day. If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it. Tons of open source software runs on Windows. Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. So those who could moved.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care. Plenty of compiled language users wouldn't need to care either.
    - cbsmith 8y ago
      So, if you are using an interpreted language, you're indifferent to cost savings enough that savings from running on ARM likely won't make enough to be a differentiator. > If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it. Yeah, I don't think the incentive is as large as you perceive it to be. Few, if any, customers are going to hire back the people they got rid of five years ago to port their old code over to a platform that is 50% cheaper to run, let alone smaller to no existent savings. But that's kind of missing the simpler problem though: there's a reason beyond form factor that the ARM version of Windows has limited features/offerings... > Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. Actually, with three year reserved instances, the pricing is largely the same in Azure.

kev009 8y ago

Yawn, the amount of publicity ARM gets for free for the past decade to enter the data center is perplexing. The economy of these designs are not good versus the competition full stop. There are three chips that work well in the data center: EPYC, Xeon, and POWER. All of these are billion dollar designs. Nothing about the ARM ecosystem supports designing to these same constraints or spending that amount of money to enter this space seriously.

twoodfin 8y ago

Pretty funny to see “Dave Patterson” described as “a Google chip specialist”!

cbsmith 8y ago
I was like, "is that the same Dave Patterson?", and then thinking about Google & typical tech journalism I realized, "yeah, of course it is".

Solar19 8y ago

Why ARM though? The article touts how this is a homegrown chip, and Amazon obviously has the resources to build a truly homegrown, optimized CPU. Why use ARM instead and import all of its idiosyncrasies? I guess I could ask the question more broadly. Why does every company that "designs its own chip" use ARM instead of designing its own ISA? How much work does it save? How much optimization does it forsake? I'm reminded of John Regehr's post on discovering the optimal instruction set: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669

pcwalton 8y ago
It's not just the ISA that you get when you license from ARM: it's the entire HDL source. If you go even further and get an architecture license, you also get a whole bunch of fundamental technical documents and a test suite. This saves a ton of time. There's the issue of software compatibility. Writing a port of Linux—kernel and userland—is a ton of work. And if you have other chips on board, such as a GPU, the only drivers available may be ARM-only binary blobs. There might be an entire ecosystem of ARM software you have to keep supporting (which is one reason why Apple doesn't [yet] design their own ISA). RISC-V has a small chance of commoditizing some of this stuff someday, but not yet.
twtw 8y ago
> how much work does it save? Really a lot of work. Software compatibility and availability will make or break a processor. Unless you own the entire stack and are willing to deal with the struggles of a custom ISA, nobody wants to make a new one - the benefits probably aren't that great.
- kelp 8y ago
  This can't be overstated for a cloud provider, especially one like AWS that wants to run everything for everyone. ARM has good OS and compiler support, and if you want people to move some workloads off x86 to another architecture, you're gonna want that migration to be as painless as possible.
justincormack 8y ago

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Apologies in advance for the layperson question: It's my understanding that a lot of CPU gains come from caching. That suggests to me that there is potential performance to be gained by caching across a larger number of machines. Is that something Amazon could do here? Somehow connect all their machines and cache in a huge space? Maybe individual physical machines would be more like a front end for a cache space, and when I get an Amazon instance, it's actually a "virtual" CPU that pieces together instructions that are mostly already cached in various places throughout the network? Is that even theoretically possible, or is it total fantasy?

rblatz 8y ago
Cache is insanely fast, orders of magnitude faster than ram, and basically instant compared to going to disk or another machine on the network. I would find it unlikely that they could overcome the added network latency introduced in such a system. Edit: check this out for more info https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...
- sharpneli 8y ago
  And to give the 1ns L1 access time some physicality. During 1 nanosecond light in vacuum travels 30 centimeters, or 12 inches. Signals in conductors travel slower. It is ridiculously short amount of time. This means that there will absolutely never* be anything that can give faster access that is going to be farther than that from the CPU. Or more specifically half of that distance as the message to request what part of the cache to read must travel to the cache itself. * Unless we find out FTL is possible. But it's a rather safe bet to assume no.
Merad 8y ago
I'm going by memory here, but IIRC the fastest level of CPU cache (L1) can be accessed in about 2 nanoseconds. Even the slowest level (L3) operates on the order of a few hundred nanoseconds. RAM is slow by comparison, and network latency is so much slower it's basically glacial.
8y ago

trumped 8y ago

an amazon chip would be the last thing I would want to buy seeing how awful their tablets are....

mmaunder 8y ago

Amazon sell compute to the world. This is vertical integration and makes sense at a certain scale. That scale has to be massive, but they appear to have reached it. They may have chosen to execute sooner if they also plan to sell the chips to hardware vendors like Dell and the financials check out.

maddyboo 8y ago

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom. For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to silicon to firmware to OS to ecosystem. They have very little incentive to interoperate with external organizations via open standards because they own many of the pieces which need to be interoperable. Thus, they can force users and developers to use their tooling, the applications they approve of, dictate what code will run on their platform, and how easily you can inspect, modify, or repair their products. This is all to say, it is easy to imagine a future where all performance-competitive technology is entirely built upon proprietary, locked down stacks – AND – it will be at a level of complexity and specificity that independent people simply cannot gain access to the ability to create competitive solutions. It could be back to the days of the mainframe, but worse, where only the corporations who create the technology will have access to the knowledge and tools to experiment and innovate on a competitive scale. Amazon wants developers to build solutions entirely on top of their platform using closed source core components. They also want to control the silicon their own platform runs on. In 10 years, what else will they own, how much will this effect the freedom offered by competitors, and what impact will it all have on our freedom to build cool shit?

reikonomusha 8y ago
For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX. Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for. With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

plinkplonk 8y ago

(Tangential) What I'd really like to see is a competitor to Google's TPU that I can actually buy (vs rent on the cloud)

DeathArrow 8y ago
Check here: https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100/dp/B076P84525 https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100...

paulie_a 8y ago

Amd has been kicking the shit out of Intel for 30 years. No seemed to notice. Their 386 was faster than Intel 486. The octa core that is tenish years old is still competitive against non Xeon chips. At the time it completely destroyed intela chips for half or less of the price. Intel is doing nothing new and just gliding. They haven't done anything interesting in 20 years, the p4s and rdram were an incredible pile of junk. The itanic.. that says it all It's cute I get a downvoted instead of an actual rebuttal. Amd has been doing great work for a far less price, Intel has been phoning it in for decades, and for a good bit of time making inferior technology.

nickik 8y ago

To bad they are not doing this with RISC-V. Getting a large costumer and high performance implementations would been a great boost. Since this is about vertical integration for them it would make a certain amount of sense.

DeathArrow 8y ago
Bad for RISC-V, good for Amazon. RISC-V is in a far less usable state than ARM ISA.
- nickik 8y ago
  Why would it be bad for RISC-V if a large company invest money and moves workloads to it? Of course RISC-V is not as a far as ARM but if Amazon really had that strategy the ISA would hardly be their primary problem.

kelp 8y ago

I'm by no means an expert in this, and maybe it's a bit obvious, but hadn't seen this mentioned yet. I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs. Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains. The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads. The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages. I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads. I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.) If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal. I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like. It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.

snaky 8y ago
> the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads Sure, the cloud is a classical mainframe, and mainframes are famous for using specialized hardware for pretty much everything.

sunstone 8y ago

And Amazon is not alone. Other potential candidates to add to list include AMD, Apple and Qualcomm. Maybe a few others that don't come to mind right away.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

Open Source will never be able to continously supply bleeding edge hardware and software - its is however able to specify data transfer standards, that have to be upheld to prevent lock in of customers. It should do that.

skybrian 8y ago

You might compare this with Google's partnership with IBM, using POWER chips in their data centers. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-centers-now-have-ibm-inside.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-cente...

ksec 8y ago

Designing an ARM Chip from ARM blueprint and TSMC is relatively simple and cheap for Amazon. And there is enough market and hype to justify the investment as they will probably break even within 24 months. It has become obvious that Intel isn't really willing to lower price that affect margin and sales. So Amazon needs to make a statement to Intel to say they have lots of options, EPYC and ARM. I don't want to hype Zen 2 / EPYC 2, but I do think it will be very competitive. And that is a Threat to Intel. And fundamentally, the REAL threat is neither ARM, AMD or even RSIC-V, it is TSMC.

acqq 8y ago

The article is non technical. For those who search for that: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton_specs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton... "Semiconductor industry watcher David Schor shared SciMark and C-Ray benchmarks for the 16-core Graviton. In the SciMark testing, the AWS system-on-chip was twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on Linux 4.14." http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI ""It does well on the Phoronix Test Suite," he said. "It does poorly benchmarking our website fully deployed on it: Nginx + PHP + MediaWiki, and everything else involved. This is your 'real world' test. All 16 cores can't match even 5 cores of our Xeon E5-2697 v4."" "The system-on-chips use a mix of Arm's data-center-friendly Neoverse technology, and Annapurna's in-house designs. The 16 vCPU instances are arranged in four quad-core clusters with 2MB of shared L2 cache per cluster, and 32KB of L1 data cache, and 48KB of L1 instruction cache, per core. One vCPU maps to one physical core."

aneutron 8y ago

They're ignoring the fact that it's not even the same ISA, not even the same use cases or maturity for these ISAs, and that for them to actually produce a x86 chip, the only way to do that is to licence either AMD or Intel as IIRC they're the only ones to hold the x86 patent. That or change the way a majority of the software stack was written for the past 15 years.

gpderetta 8y ago
A lot of the software stack was rewritten in the past 10 year to make sure that it would work well on ARM though. ARM itself contributed to the effort.

DeathArrow 8y ago

It's not exactly a threat. Amazon use cortex A72 in their CPUs and there's no way they can replace most Intel CPUs with that. The performance isn't there.

rbanffy 8y ago
It looks they are after the uses where an Intel server-grade CPU is overkill. If an A72 solves my problem and is cheaper than the cheapest x86 I can get, A72 it'll be. ARM servers are very useful for low base loads. If the demand gets higher, there is no reason not to spin up a couple x86's to take the load off the ARM boxes.
simonh 8y ago
The threat is the potential for this to encroach on Intel's territory in the future, not necessarily this specific chip. The article makes this clear by opening with talk of a 'new line of work' and 'going the do-it-yourself route'. This is about the trend, not the moment and I thought they did a good job clearly framing it that way.
ptman 8y ago
There are workloads where I/O and RAM dominate

novaRom 8y ago

In the near future we will see more and more chips coming from Asia. Not just final silicon production, test, and packaging, but also complete hardware design. They will produce GPUs, FPGAs, and CPUs of all classes. Look how many students in Computer Design, Digital Design, Electrical Engineering graduate every single year. Multiply that by low costs with high productivity and you will find Silicon Valley will face a very strong competitor.

yonkshi 8y ago
I think we will also see proportionally more and more chips coming out of US companies as well. When Google started their own chips (TPUs), they just kickstarted a vertical integration race amongst the tech giants. Apple, Intel, Nvidia were the old players, Google is dipping their toes in with TPU, now Amazon and probably soon Microsoft and FB. I think overall we will see more chips from both Asia and US
- evancox100 8y ago
  Microsoft has been doing custom silicon longer than either Google or Amazon, as a part of the Xbox security-related functionality I believe. And then other consumer products like Hololens, custom pen ASIC in Surface, etc. Now Azure Sphere (more so giving away silicon IP to others, but still have their fingers in it.) Edit: All this in addition to their widespread and well documented usage of FPGAs for Azure network offload and Bing acceleration.

fareesh 8y ago

How does competition work with regard to trade secrets like chip design etc? If I hire the top dogs at a chip maker and they design a similar chip for my company from memory, how is this prevented from happening?

wmf 8y ago
There are patents and non-competes in some states but basically nothing prevents it. Silicon Valley exists because of the cycle of engineers leaving established companies to start startups (or now, leaving established companies to go to companies that are branching out into every area possible).
- fareesh 8y ago
  Would patenting the chip design also expose the very secret that is being guarded? So someone in China could just read the patent and make the same thing, is that right?
  - wmf 8y ago
    Some companies patent all their ideas, including the ones they don't use. This creates a chaff effect where you can't be sure which ideas you should copy. There are certainly trade secrets that aren't patented but the whole point is that they aren't protected as much.

karakanb 8y ago

Truly lame question, is there any possibility for Amazon or other cloud providers to monitor the executed instructions and their distribution? Could this allow more optimized architectures for specific loads, or would this not bring any actual benefit?

srinikoganti 8y ago

This is oversimplification. Binary compatibility, of millions of third party libraries out there, is the biggest hurdle. How many years did it take to switch from Python 2.7 to Python 3 ? AWS lockin is a bigger threat. I prefer to keep my binaries cloud agnostic and X86 and X64 compatible rather than AWS only code or even ARM binary. By the way what happened to Amazon phones ?

leowoo91 8y ago
What is worrying me more is that we are all stuck on idea of being locked-in to any vendor. Why can't we focus on innovation instead? Take Instagram for e.g. they started with AWS right? Then moved on the real hardware within few weeks (if I remember correctly) after acquisition. I understand, cost of the unseen problems are high, but it might be good idea to remember it also much depends on delivering speed.

StreamBright 8y ago

Not only Amazon's but Apple's, Jiāngnán's as well. I think Intel really should crank up innovation if they would like to stay competitive.

glenrivard 8y ago

Cloud changes the business dynamics with the chip business. Before a Dell purchased a chip from Intel and sold the server to someone else. Now the companies buying are running the servers. That changes everything. I would expect more and more the chips used to come from the big cloud providers. I would expect once Google gets Zircon further along to build their own CPUs that are optimized for it. I do hope they use RISC-V ISA like they have with the PVC.

mehdix 8y ago

Open source has won the software, however it mostly runs on closed-source and proprietary hardware. Perhaps open hardware is the ultimate answer.

syntaxing 8y ago

I thought Amazon is just licensing a custom design from ARM and manufacturing from TSMC. It's a step in the right direction but it'll be a good amount of years before Amazon has their own Fab making their own chips.

tmaly 8y ago

As much as it is easy to license from ARM and use TSM as a foundry, it does not make much economic sense. Look at Google's purchase of Motorola. They ended up selling Motorola to Lenova. The hardware industry and specifically the chip industry is very specialized. If your code competency is not chip making, it really does not make sense to try to enter the industry.