17 ms·

Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS

231 points by ChuckMcM 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago
This is an interesting twist in the processor wars, here is the #1 cloud company that is turning its profits in providing cloud services in to processor R&D to build new CPUs. This is a much more important announcement than the press is giving it credit for. I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android. Doing this both takes away Intel's ability to 'gate' what is and isn't a cellphone processor, and their ability to set the margins they would like. Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been designing and building their own server designs for years. This takes away Intel's ability to gate their choices at the Server manufacturer. As a result more AMD server processors were deployed by these three companies than the rest of the market combined. Now Amazon is taking profits from the AWS service and re-investing them in bespoke CPUs that are tuned to the workloads they can see customers running on their infrastructure. As a result they will not only enhance their cost/power edge over Google, Microsoft, and everyone else, their infrastructure can be better than anything you can buy in order to run your own workload, locking you into their service (a moat if you will for keeping you there). If they succeed, Google and Facebook will follow suit. (I am guessing Google already is well down this path, knowing them but also knowing their secrecy about such things) If you take 50% of the enterprise server market out of Intel's portfolio they are left fighting for enthusiast/gamer share and AMD is eating their lunch there. It is going to be really interesting to watch this play out.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  This is entirely Intel's fault for trying to get fat by choking out the market with a gazillion UPCs and a ton of markup. They exhausted their own food supply.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Intel's gazillion SKUs are really just a few abstract-ideal "optimal product, highest price" makes of processor, binned down into many different "sub-optimal product, lower price" channels. If you collapse the binnings together, they're really only producing ~four CPUs at a time. At least for commercial availability. There's tons of enterprise SKUs just to serve customers like AWS, of course, but that's not to "squeeze the market"; that's because the customer wants custom IP cores in their chips.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      With how 10mn is going for Intel, I bet the SKUs really are just the result of binning, not something driven by the sales and marketing side.
  - moonbug 7y ago
    they also made bank, like good monopolists ought
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Intel became too big and too slow. Their R&D efforts are not as efficient as Apple's or in this case Amazon's. This story also proves that in many cases you are better off with a specific design instead of a generic one. If the marketing message is true Amazon has a huge edge.[1] 1. 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances
  - atq2119 7y ago
    Keep in mind that getting 40% better price performance doesn't mean their tech is better. It could just mean they're cutting margins (to drive adoption).
    - StreamBright 7y ago
      Absolutely. From the customer perspective does it matter? If later on it goes back to Intel levels than it means other cloud vendors can compete without a custom CPU. What worries me is what if it is true and not for the too thin margin?
- localhost 7y ago
  AMD is also eating Intel's lunch in datacenter. Last time I checked (I don't keep track of Intel pricing) AMD had a 5x price/performance advantage over Intel at the launch of EPYC ROME.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
    - reitzensteinm 7y ago
      Winning a benchmark by a wide margin is pretty close if you have your foot in the door, which of course AMD does not. Their success here is going to be nonlinear depending on how long they stay in the lead.
      - nl 7y ago
        AWS has AMD offerings. That's plenty foot in the door.
    - topicseed 7y ago
      True, but these things take time to move mostly due to time-constrained contracts.
    - privateSFacct 7y ago
      It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience
      - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
        It’s generally hard to buy AMD CPUs period.
        7y ago
- monocasa 7y ago
  > I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android. Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through 3GS ran on Samsung SoCs. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple used their own SoCs. Not sure how Samsung could be following suit in that case. Edit: also, Apple was never going to wait around for Intel. Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM, back in the early ninties, had used ARM.in the whole iPod line (as well as the ill fated Newton), and iPhones lined up with ARMs in mobile TDPs starting to have full MMUs.
  - PHGamer 7y ago
    Samsung has Exynos however, due to Qualcomm and patents you don't ever see their phones equipped with it here in America.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      I mean, now you don't. But earlier cellphones hadn't integrated the baseband yet so it was a moot point either way. Still not seeing how Samsung followed Apple in SoC design when Apple started by using Samsung SoCs.
      - rsynnott 7y ago
        Apple followed Samsung in SoC design, but Samsung (in 2016) followed Apple (2011) in core design. I expect that’s what they’re getting at.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their closest competitor). There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never provided it.
- techntoke 7y ago
  But who cares about a R&D processor that you can only use on a specific cloud hosting provider? All people will care about is if they will have to modify their applications to utilize it, and knowing Amazon that is precisely what they'll try to do. AWS is anti-competitive and it should raise alarms with many in the tech community.
- ksec 7y ago
  Agree and to add a few more things. These ARM CPU are made with ARM Core Design ( NEOVERSE N1 ) , which means there are no reason why Google or Microsoft, or even Apple and Facebook cant have their own N1. And they will because of the competitive advantage as you mentioned. This solves the Chicken and Egg Problem where ARM CPU from Qualcomm and Ampere or other Vendors could not get into Server Market due to software compatibility. And no one was willing to invest porting and making sure every software runs well on these chip without Hardware. ( One of the reason why Qualcomm exit the Server Market ) Now Amazon is doing both, all the Open Source Web Stack AWS offers will support ARM, assuming Amazon upstream all those work. And once those Software are ARM ready, other smaller Cloud Providers such as Digital Ocean, OVH, Linode etc.. will offer and switch to ARM once there are ARM CPU available. On top of my head, the last estimate HyperScaler represent 50% of Intel's DC and Enterprise Revenue. Intel's yearly revenue from DC is roughly $20B, so we are talking about a potential lost of $10B+ over the next decade. And DC has been the most profitable segment for Intel. Microsoft now also has new incentives to port Windows to work on ARM. ( A lot of Azure Customers runs out Windows VM ) They are also on their way with Windows on Snapdragon. Although I think it will be a few years before it becomes stable enough and mainstream. So 5 years down the road, You now have the servers on AWS running on ARM, all mobile and Tablet are on ARM. Intel are selling less unit to amortise its cost of R&D in each leading node. AMD with better Node fighting for marketshare. If Windows on ARM worked, it is only a matter of time Apple moves its whole Mac line across to ARM as well, may be 2025+. ( Pro Application developers will have incentive to port their work to ARM on both platform ) If Andy Grove were still alive, or his apprentice Pat Gelsinger were still around at Intel, they would be facing the same dilemma half a century ago, -Should Intel invest more in protecting the memory business and fight Japanese manufacturers or should the company flee from memories market and create a new growth market? And this time around, Should Intel invest more in protecting the x86 business and fight ARM or should the company flee from x86 and create new growth market? It was nearly 5 years ago Intel announced Custom Foundry. They had a chance to take on and compete with TSMC. They were far too worried their best tech and IP would info would leak out. They would rather do it all by themselves. 5 years later, I doubt even if they are reopening Custom Foundry there will be any customer wanting to sign up. Sorry if this is a grim outlook of Intel, I am sure they will stick around, just like any great companies once were, IBM, Sun, HP, they will have a long tail of decline until they become mostly irrelevant.
devhwrng 7y ago
The pricing level for the ARM instances should be interesting. If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in. Adoption? Sure. Lock-in? Umm... Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source. The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly works - is the same reason they can leave easily. All the other AWS proprietary APIs: sure. It'd take a stupendous amount of work for Netflix to migrate away from AWS. But running on ARM isn't really part of that.
  - bastawhiz 7y ago
    > and most software on Linux is distributed as source Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      How many of those "precompiled binaries" are truly performance critical? If it's just a single component, you can run it in qemu-user mode and still come out ahead overall.
      - tverbeure 7y ago
        How many of those precompiled binaries are performance critical? How about all? From the software that runs for hours to compile a model, the software that calculates results, to the interactive analysis software that needs to load GBs of data. The whole reason to run these things on a server farm is that you need large and fast machines that are better shared to make sure they get optimal use of the machine and of the license pool.
pvg 7y ago
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797
- sciurus 7y ago
  In case pvg's "yesterday" comment isn't clear, this link is to a previous discussion of the same story.
  - pvg 7y ago
    I also meant the apparent distance to all my troubles was significantly greater.
    - rrss 7y ago
      Looks like they're going to stick around for a while.
dman 7y ago
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason about whether it makes sense to use it for mixed workloads. d. With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads e. ARM eating their lunch in mobile f. Nvidia eating their lunch with GPGPU g. Big players are increasingly building accelerators for critical workloads that offer better power / performance h. Strong execution from AMD for the first time in over a decade i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful for the user.
- daxfohl 7y ago
  Also, end of Moore's law, slowing down the upgrade cycle and making CPU more of a commodity business. I'll add a caveat to (d) because distributed can also mean distributed across cores, and whoever handles that the best gets a strong differentiator.
  - dman 7y ago
    That is a good point.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jonstewart 7y ago
  Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile processors. ARM held on just long enough in the low margin embedded world to then conquer mobile. Intel was able to win price/performance through superior fabrication and economies of scale, but power/performance really does require a superior design. If Intel recovers, it may need to jettison x86, or offload x86 interpretation to a secondary unit for desktop processor with it gone from server procs. This would make me happy because it’s been crushing to think I might go my entire career/lifetime with little endian processors being the mainstream. :-/
walrus01 7y ago
Whatever happened with the Qualcomm Centriq ARM based server CPU? It never became available at any reasonable price in small quantities for software development/test/prototyping as something you could actually buy an ATX motherboard + CPU together and install (redhat, centos, debian, freebsd, whatever) on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-china-centriq-2400,38223.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-... https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-makes-it-official-no-more-data-center-chip.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-makes-...
- Twirrim 7y ago
  Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good money that will become a requirement for services). They're also more forward thinking and experimental than most companies are, or can afford to be. The x86 is the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" of CPUs. This promises to be quite interesting. If Amazon can prove ARM as viable on their scale, that'll help companies like Qualcomm who were struggling to drum up attention from the more traditional markets.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    Yes, that's great for amazon, but what about everyone else on the planet who has x86-64 hypervisors and would like to have the option of purchasing a 3rd choice of CPU which is not Intel or AMD, at a price/performance ratio that is somewhat competitive with existing options?
    - Twirrim 7y ago
      There are other x86-64 CPU manufacturers, but you're making a massive trade off for performance. Intel and AMD really have polished their stuff until it shines. If Amazon can prove ARM can cope with server scale operations, and even outperform x86-64, you can have a high degree of confidence that other companies will get in the game. There are many more companies manufacturing ARM chips than x86-64 (due to licensing agreements, in part)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
social_quotient 7y ago
Are we thinking Intel is Amazon’s next Barnes and Noble?
- derision 7y ago
  AMD already doing that to Intel
  - social_quotient 7y ago
    Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz. I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      > when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Early on, books sales was Amazon's core business.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
rb808 7y ago
Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessarily the future.
- boramalper 7y ago
  > Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. Maybe it’s a latency vs throughput thing? As far as I know, ARM is great at balancing latency and power consumption, but behind x64 in throughput. [citation needed]
  - PeterCorless 7y ago
    Better throughput. Our tests confirm: https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...
- kbenson 7y ago
  > Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. Depending what what performance level you're looking at, they're a very large fraction of the server cost. Get a dual or quad socket board and buy the higher end CPUs and you might be looking at well over half the cost.
  - StillBored 7y ago
    I think the point is that, if your buying a quad socket, the 2TB of ECC ram you stick in it will dwarf the core prices, or similarly its not hard to drop $50k on U.2 NVMe, etc. Its possible to shift this argument different ways depending on the part of the market your looking at.
- jws 7y ago
gautamcgoel 7y ago
I wish individual consumers could go out and buy these processors. Amazon really has little incentive to sell them - they are not primarily a chip manufacturing business, and anyways, why give away their hard-fought competitive advantage? - but damn, it would be cool to stick one of these in a workstation and watch it fly.
- wmf 7y ago
  I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)
  - gautamcgoel 7y ago
    Oh, interesting. Is Graviton designed in collaboration with Ampere?
    - wmf 7y ago
      No, but one has 64 N1 cores and the other has 80 N1 cores, probably with similar memory controllers and PCIe as well.
- pnako 7y ago
  An ARM workstation is going to fly like a Cessna.
  - wmf 7y ago
    So it'll be popular with rich hobbyists?
- PeterCorless 7y ago
  Stay tuned and look into Nuvia. https://nuviainc.com/ https://nuviainc.com/
- lsllc 7y ago
  You can get rack mount servers easily enough, the ThunderX2 processors are pretty damn fast! https://www.cavium.com/news/gigabyte-announces-384-core-2u-server-powered-by-cavium-thunderx-armv8-processors https://www.cavium.com/news/gigabyte-announces-384-core-2u-s...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kresten 7y ago
Complexity and cost have cooled my enthusiasm for AWS.
bluedino 7y ago
What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk, network, power...
- kova12 7y ago
  AWS is running on very thin margins, and every couple precent in extra productivity could easily mean doubling profits.
  - sanxiyn 7y ago
    > AWS is running on very thin margins Incorrect. Amazon is a public company, and their own report tells us that AWS margin is 25%, as of 2019 Q3.
- notatoad 7y ago
  I'm guessing power is the big one. A marginally cheaper cpu is not that big of a deal, but a cpu that costs marginally less per hour to run will save them a lot at scale.
sitkack 7y ago
> Based on these results, we are planning to use these instances to power Amazon EMR, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and other AWS services. Clouds are migrating to AMD and Amazon kicks back with home grown cores. Ouch. Chip vendors have to let go of their ISAs, no one cares, as long as you can run Debian on it.
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
What is "Graviton2" in this context? There's no Wikipedia page for it, and the regular google search results all loop back to this AWS announcement.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  I am gathering that it's a chip, a CPU chip, seem to be ARM architecture not intel x86; and is an important chip or will be due to this? I don't know why though.
  - PeterCorless 7y ago
    Here's our take. This is big. https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...
    - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
      I'm still reading between the lines here, which is frustrating and doesn't reflect well on the journalism; So you say: "AWS announced in late 2018 the EC2 A1 instances, featuring their own AWS-manufactured Arm silicon" ... "AWS during its annual re:Invent conference announced the availability of their new class of Arm-based servers, the M6g and M6gd instances among others, based on the Graviton2 processor." So the Graviton2 is made by Amazon as well? Under licence from ARM, I mean, like other ARM design chips. _edit_ Looks like it, yes. Here is the context necessary to understand the story: https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-server-chip%3A-will-it-hurt-intel-2019-12-04 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-s...
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  Here is the context necessary to understand the story: https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-server-chip%3A-will-it-hurt-intel-2019-12-04 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-s...
PeterCorless 7y ago
We just released our test results of the new Graviton2-based M6g server. Pretty solid numbers. This is a game-changer. https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...
PeterCorless 7y ago
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284

231 points by ChuckMcM 7y ago

This is an interesting twist in the processor wars, here is the #1 cloud company that is turning its profits in providing cloud services in to processor R&D to build new CPUs. This is a much more important announcement than the press is giving it credit for. I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android. Doing this both takes away Intel's ability to 'gate' what is and isn't a cellphone processor, and their ability to set the margins they would like. Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been designing and building their own server designs for years. This takes away Intel's ability to gate their choices at the Server manufacturer. As a result more AMD server processors were deployed by these three companies than the rest of the market combined. Now Amazon is taking profits from the AWS service and re-investing them in bespoke CPUs that are tuned to the workloads they can see customers running on their infrastructure. As a result they will not only enhance their cost/power edge over Google, Microsoft, and everyone else, their infrastructure can be better than anything you can buy in order to run your own workload, locking you into their service (a moat if you will for keeping you there). If they succeed, Google and Facebook will follow suit. (I am guessing Google already is well down this path, knowing them but also knowing their secrecy about such things) If you take 50% of the enterprise server market out of Intel's portfolio they are left fighting for enthusiast/gamer share and AMD is eating their lunch there. It is going to be really interesting to watch this play out.

vorpalhex 7y ago
This is entirely Intel's fault for trying to get fat by choking out the market with a gazillion UPCs and a ton of markup. They exhausted their own food supply.
- derefr 7y ago
  Intel's gazillion SKUs are really just a few abstract-ideal "optimal product, highest price" makes of processor, binned down into many different "sub-optimal product, lower price" channels. If you collapse the binnings together, they're really only producing ~four CPUs at a time. At least for commercial availability. There's tons of enterprise SKUs just to serve customers like AWS, of course, but that's not to "squeeze the market"; that's because the customer wants custom IP cores in their chips.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    With how 10mn is going for Intel, I bet the SKUs really are just the result of binning, not something driven by the sales and marketing side.
- moonbug 7y ago
  they also made bank, like good monopolists ought
StreamBright 7y ago
Intel became too big and too slow. Their R&D efforts are not as efficient as Apple's or in this case Amazon's. This story also proves that in many cases you are better off with a specific design instead of a generic one. If the marketing message is true Amazon has a huge edge.[1] 1. 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances
- atq2119 7y ago
  Keep in mind that getting 40% better price performance doesn't mean their tech is better. It could just mean they're cutting margins (to drive adoption).
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    Absolutely. From the customer perspective does it matter? If later on it goes back to Intel levels than it means other cloud vendors can compete without a custom CPU. What worries me is what if it is true and not for the too thin margin?
localhost 7y ago
AMD is also eating Intel's lunch in datacenter. Last time I checked (I don't keep track of Intel pricing) AMD had a 5x price/performance advantage over Intel at the launch of EPYC ROME.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    Winning a benchmark by a wide margin is pretty close if you have your foot in the door, which of course AMD does not. Their success here is going to be nonlinear depending on how long they stay in the lead.
    - nl 7y ago
      AWS has AMD offerings. That's plenty foot in the door.
  - topicseed 7y ago
    True, but these things take time to move mostly due to time-constrained contracts.
  - privateSFacct 7y ago
    It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      It’s generally hard to buy AMD CPUs period.
      - 7y ago
monocasa 7y ago
> I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android. Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through 3GS ran on Samsung SoCs. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple used their own SoCs. Not sure how Samsung could be following suit in that case. Edit: also, Apple was never going to wait around for Intel. Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM, back in the early ninties, had used ARM.in the whole iPod line (as well as the ill fated Newton), and iPhones lined up with ARMs in mobile TDPs starting to have full MMUs.
- PHGamer 7y ago
  Samsung has Exynos however, due to Qualcomm and patents you don't ever see their phones equipped with it here in America.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    I mean, now you don't. But earlier cellphones hadn't integrated the baseband yet so it was a moot point either way. Still not seeing how Samsung followed Apple in SoC design when Apple started by using Samsung SoCs.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      Apple followed Samsung in SoC design, but Samsung (in 2016) followed Apple (2011) in core design. I expect that’s what they’re getting at.
- kbenson 7y ago
  At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their closest competitor). There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never provided it.
techntoke 7y ago
But who cares about a R&D processor that you can only use on a specific cloud hosting provider? All people will care about is if they will have to modify their applications to utilize it, and knowing Amazon that is precisely what they'll try to do. AWS is anti-competitive and it should raise alarms with many in the tech community.
ksec 7y ago
Agree and to add a few more things. These ARM CPU are made with ARM Core Design ( NEOVERSE N1 ) , which means there are no reason why Google or Microsoft, or even Apple and Facebook cant have their own N1. And they will because of the competitive advantage as you mentioned. This solves the Chicken and Egg Problem where ARM CPU from Qualcomm and Ampere or other Vendors could not get into Server Market due to software compatibility. And no one was willing to invest porting and making sure every software runs well on these chip without Hardware. ( One of the reason why Qualcomm exit the Server Market ) Now Amazon is doing both, all the Open Source Web Stack AWS offers will support ARM, assuming Amazon upstream all those work. And once those Software are ARM ready, other smaller Cloud Providers such as Digital Ocean, OVH, Linode etc.. will offer and switch to ARM once there are ARM CPU available. On top of my head, the last estimate HyperScaler represent 50% of Intel's DC and Enterprise Revenue. Intel's yearly revenue from DC is roughly $20B, so we are talking about a potential lost of $10B+ over the next decade. And DC has been the most profitable segment for Intel. Microsoft now also has new incentives to port Windows to work on ARM. ( A lot of Azure Customers runs out Windows VM ) They are also on their way with Windows on Snapdragon. Although I think it will be a few years before it becomes stable enough and mainstream. So 5 years down the road, You now have the servers on AWS running on ARM, all mobile and Tablet are on ARM. Intel are selling less unit to amortise its cost of R&D in each leading node. AMD with better Node fighting for marketshare. If Windows on ARM worked, it is only a matter of time Apple moves its whole Mac line across to ARM as well, may be 2025+. ( Pro Application developers will have incentive to port their work to ARM on both platform ) If Andy Grove were still alive, or his apprentice Pat Gelsinger were still around at Intel, they would be facing the same dilemma half a century ago, -Should Intel invest more in protecting the memory business and fight Japanese manufacturers or should the company flee from memories market and create a new growth market? And this time around, Should Intel invest more in protecting the x86 business and fight ARM or should the company flee from x86 and create new growth market? It was nearly 5 years ago Intel announced Custom Foundry. They had a chance to take on and compete with TSMC. They were far too worried their best tech and IP would info would leak out. They would rather do it all by themselves. 5 years later, I doubt even if they are reopening Custom Foundry there will be any customer wanting to sign up. Sorry if this is a grim outlook of Intel, I am sure they will stick around, just like any great companies once were, IBM, Sun, HP, they will have a long tail of decline until they become mostly irrelevant.

devhwrng 7y ago

The pricing level for the ARM instances should be interesting. If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in.

nordsieck 7y ago
> If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really drive adoption and lock-in. Adoption? Sure. Lock-in? Umm... Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source. The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly works - is the same reason they can leave easily. All the other AWS proprietary APIs: sure. It'd take a stupendous amount of work for Netflix to migrate away from AWS. But running on ARM isn't really part of that.
- bastawhiz 7y ago
  > and most software on Linux is distributed as source Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which architectures your vendor(s) support.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    How many of those "precompiled binaries" are truly performance critical? If it's just a single component, you can run it in qemu-user mode and still come out ahead overall.
    - tverbeure 7y ago
      How many of those precompiled binaries are performance critical? How about all? From the software that runs for hours to compile a model, the software that calculates results, to the interactive analysis software that needs to load GBs of data. The whole reason to run these things on a server farm is that you need large and fast machines that are better shared to make sure they get optimal use of the machine and of the license pool.

pvg 7y ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797

sciurus 7y ago
In case pvg's "yesterday" comment isn't clear, this link is to a previous discussion of the same story.
- pvg 7y ago
  I also meant the apparent distance to all my troubles was significantly greater.
  - rrss 7y ago
    Looks like they're going to stick around for a while.

dman 7y ago

If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason about whether it makes sense to use it for mixed workloads. d. With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads e. ARM eating their lunch in mobile f. Nvidia eating their lunch with GPGPU g. Big players are increasingly building accelerators for critical workloads that offer better power / performance h. Strong execution from AMD for the first time in over a decade i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful for the user.

daxfohl 7y ago
Also, end of Moore's law, slowing down the upgrade cycle and making CPU more of a commodity business. I'll add a caveat to (d) because distributed can also mean distributed across cores, and whoever handles that the best gets a strong differentiator.
- dman 7y ago
  That is a good point.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonstewart 7y ago
Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile processors. ARM held on just long enough in the low margin embedded world to then conquer mobile. Intel was able to win price/performance through superior fabrication and economies of scale, but power/performance really does require a superior design. If Intel recovers, it may need to jettison x86, or offload x86 interpretation to a secondary unit for desktop processor with it gone from server procs. This would make me happy because it’s been crushing to think I might go my entire career/lifetime with little endian processors being the mainstream. :-/

walrus01 7y ago

Whatever happened with the Qualcomm Centriq ARM based server CPU? It never became available at any reasonable price in small quantities for software development/test/prototyping as something you could actually buy an ATX motherboard + CPU together and install (redhat, centos, debian, freebsd, whatever) on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-china-centriq-2400,38223.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-... https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-makes-it-official-no-more-data-center-chip.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-makes-...

Twirrim 7y ago
Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good money that will become a requirement for services). They're also more forward thinking and experimental than most companies are, or can afford to be. The x86 is the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" of CPUs. This promises to be quite interesting. If Amazon can prove ARM as viable on their scale, that'll help companies like Qualcomm who were struggling to drum up attention from the more traditional markets.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Yes, that's great for amazon, but what about everyone else on the planet who has x86-64 hypervisors and would like to have the option of purchasing a 3rd choice of CPU which is not Intel or AMD, at a price/performance ratio that is somewhat competitive with existing options?
  - Twirrim 7y ago
    There are other x86-64 CPU manufacturers, but you're making a massive trade off for performance. Intel and AMD really have polished their stuff until it shines. If Amazon can prove ARM can cope with server scale operations, and even outperform x86-64, you can have a high degree of confidence that other companies will get in the game. There are many more companies manufacturing ARM chips than x86-64 (due to licensing agreements, in part)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

social_quotient 7y ago

Are we thinking Intel is Amazon’s next Barnes and Noble?

derision 7y ago
AMD already doing that to Intel
- social_quotient 7y ago
  Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz. I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    > when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an ancillary means to their own core business. Early on, books sales was Amazon's core business.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

rb808 7y ago

Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed. Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent past either. Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessarily the future.

boramalper 7y ago
> Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick. Maybe it’s a latency vs throughput thing? As far as I know, ARM is great at balancing latency and power consumption, but behind x64 in throughput. [citation needed]
- PeterCorless 7y ago
  Better throughput. Our tests confirm: https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...
kbenson 7y ago
> Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server. Depending what what performance level you're looking at, they're a very large fraction of the server cost. Get a dual or quad socket board and buy the higher end CPUs and you might be looking at well over half the cost.
- StillBored 7y ago
  I think the point is that, if your buying a quad socket, the 2TB of ECC ram you stick in it will dwarf the core prices, or similarly its not hard to drop $50k on U.2 NVMe, etc. Its possible to shift this argument different ways depending on the part of the market your looking at.
jws 7y ago

gautamcgoel 7y ago

I wish individual consumers could go out and buy these processors. Amazon really has little incentive to sell them - they are not primarily a chip manufacturing business, and anyways, why give away their hard-fought competitive advantage? - but damn, it would be cool to stick one of these in a workstation and watch it fly.

wmf 7y ago
I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)
- gautamcgoel 7y ago
  Oh, interesting. Is Graviton designed in collaboration with Ampere?
  - wmf 7y ago
    No, but one has 64 N1 cores and the other has 80 N1 cores, probably with similar memory controllers and PCIe as well.
pnako 7y ago
An ARM workstation is going to fly like a Cessna.
- wmf 7y ago
  So it'll be popular with rich hobbyists?
PeterCorless 7y ago
Stay tuned and look into Nuvia. https://nuviainc.com/ https://nuviainc.com/
lsllc 7y ago
You can get rack mount servers easily enough, the ThunderX2 processors are pretty damn fast! https://www.cavium.com/news/gigabyte-announces-384-core-2u-server-powered-by-cavium-thunderx-armv8-processors https://www.cavium.com/news/gigabyte-announces-384-core-2u-s...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kresten 7y ago

Complexity and cost have cooled my enthusiasm for AWS.

bluedino 7y ago

What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk, network, power...

kova12 7y ago
AWS is running on very thin margins, and every couple precent in extra productivity could easily mean doubling profits.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  > AWS is running on very thin margins Incorrect. Amazon is a public company, and their own report tells us that AWS margin is 25%, as of 2019 Q3.
notatoad 7y ago
I'm guessing power is the big one. A marginally cheaper cpu is not that big of a deal, but a cpu that costs marginally less per hour to run will save them a lot at scale.

sitkack 7y ago

> Based on these results, we are planning to use these instances to power Amazon EMR, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and other AWS services. Clouds are migrating to AMD and Amazon kicks back with home grown cores. Ouch. Chip vendors have to let go of their ISAs, no one cares, as long as you can run Debian on it.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

What is "Graviton2" in this context? There's no Wikipedia page for it, and the regular google search results all loop back to this AWS announcement.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
I am gathering that it's a chip, a CPU chip, seem to be ARM architecture not intel x86; and is an important chip or will be due to this? I don't know why though.
- PeterCorless 7y ago
  Here's our take. This is big. https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
    I'm still reading between the lines here, which is frustrating and doesn't reflect well on the journalism; So you say: "AWS announced in late 2018 the EC2 A1 instances, featuring their own AWS-manufactured Arm silicon" ... "AWS during its annual re:Invent conference announced the availability of their new class of Arm-based servers, the M6g and M6gd instances among others, based on the Graviton2 processor." So the Graviton2 is made by Amazon as well? Under licence from ARM, I mean, like other ARM design chips. _edit_ Looks like it, yes. Here is the context necessary to understand the story: https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-server-chip%3A-will-it-hurt-intel-2019-12-04 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-s...
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
Here is the context necessary to understand the story: https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-server-chip%3A-will-it-hurt-intel-2019-12-04 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-s...

PeterCorless 7y ago

We just released our test results of the new Graviton2-based M6g server. Pretty solid numbers. This is a game-changer. https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-dominance/ https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...

PeterCorless 7y ago

Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284