6 ms·
(I work for AWS. Opinions are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.) I've been doing some initial M6g tests in my lab, and while I'm not able to di
by otterley 7y ago
(I work for AWS. Opinions are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.)
I've been doing some initial M6g tests in my lab, and while I'm not able to disclose benchmarks, I can say that my real-world experience so far reflects what's been claimed elsewhere.
Graviton2 is going to be a game changer. It's not like the usual experience with ARM where you have to trade off performance for price, and decide whether migrating is worth the recompilation effort. In my lab, performance of the workloads I've tried so far is uniformly better than on the equivalent M5 configuration running on the Intel processor. You're not sacrificing anything by running on Graviton2.
If your workloads are based on scripting languages, Java, or Go, or you can recompile your C/C++ code, you're going to want to use these instances if you can. The pricing is going to make it irresistible. Basically, unless you're running COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software), it's a no-brainer.
- rbranson 7y agoI am extremely excited about this development. Less so getting everything that assumes x86 in the stack supporting a “parameterized” platform. (Hi Michael!)
- otterley 7y agoHi Rick! I know it's only a part of the toolchain needed to support the migration, but multi-arch Docker image support for Amazon ECR is definitely on our immediate roadmap.
- floatboth 7y agoheh, I've had a very fun experience with spotinst.com — my a1 spot instance went down and that service couldn't restore it because it did not label the AMI as arm64. Reported that to them, got a couple acknowledgements but haven't heard back in a while, so presumably this is still not fixed.
- chroem- 7y agoDoes the chip still manage to have superior power efficiency versus x86 even at these performance levels?
- QuinnyPig 7y agoTo my uninformed understanding, power efficiency wasn’t really the design goal. If it’s AWS’s power bill, do we care as much (presuming sustainable energy)?
- Scaevolus 7y agoPower and heat dissipation are a huge part of TCO for datacenters. I'm sure Amazon picked an appropriate point on the performance per watt curve.
- qeternity 7y agoGiven that your cost is going to be correlated to AWS’s cost of goods sold, I’d argue of course we care.
- QuinnyPig 7y agoI care what AWS charges me; I don’t have the energy to care what their underlying cost structure and its constituent parts looks like.
- qeternity 7y agoAs I said in my comment, their underlying cost structure has a direct relationship to the cost you incur (at least in the long run with semi efficient markets). There’s a reason why commodity markets tend to revert towards variable cost.
- ksec 7y ago> There’s a reason why commodity markets tend to revert towards variable cost. Is that some theory of economical model ? Or is that a way of saying the final price of a product varies greatly because the commodity part with the product is only a small percentage of the TCO / BOM ?
- wmf 7y ago
- staticassertion 7y agoWould these chips be reasonable for something like an i3en class?
- m0zg 7y agoI feel like this is where hyperthreading is finally starting to bite Intel in the rear. Cloud providers have been selling "VCPUs" that aren't actual cores. I best most customers don't even know what they're buying. Even if ARM cores are slower (and they don't really have to be), they're still going to be faster than hyperthreads.
- lallysingh 7y agoI don't think so. Most apps get 0.5-0.6 instructions completed per clock cycle, and Intel cores can put out multiple instructions per cycle. Most customers don't measure, and don't optimize cache usage for the actual tradeoffs (cache, tlbs) to matter.
- m0zg 7y agoMost, yes. But things like databases, video/data compression, compute / deep learning workloads, etc, _are_ negatively affected by the fact that cores aren't really cores. Basically anything that's actually using the CPU to an appreciable extent will be affected by that. Add to that the hyperthreading-specific CVEs as well.
- rumanator 7y agoI'm confident that those working on applications where CPU performance is an important issue, as well as reliability of said performance, are actually not running their critical applications on virtualized infrastructure. The cloud is good for "good enough" solutions where architectural design leveraging horizontal scaling does the job well. In those applications, how a CPU is used or what their performance is is something that falls in the wrong side of the domain of microoptimization. In the Cloud world, the only thing that's relevant is if an application infrastructure needs to scale, and what's the financial impact of that in the operational cost.
- m0zg 7y agoYour confidence is misplaced. Netflix is a well known user of cloud services for encoding, and just about everyone runs at least part of their deep learning workloads on AWS or Google Cloud. Not to mention databases.
- QuinnyPig 7y agoI too have been playing with m6g, and while I’m allowed to disclose benchmarks I haven’t bothered to run any; the pedantry that unleashes is enough to drive me to drink. “Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.” I can say that the qualitative experience is superb; everything “just works” as you’d expect it to, and performance is stellar.
- vbezhenar 7y agoIt is surprising, because I was under impression that Java has so many optimizations for x86 and ARM was so new that it's almost impossible to beat x86 without very significant investments. It's nice to hear that I was wrong.
- pm215 7y agoIt's not very "new". People have been working on porting, improving and optimizing software for the Arm server ecosystem for more than a decade now; really performant and widely available hardware may be new on the scene, but it would be silly to wait for that before starting work on the software side of things...
- Twirrim 7y agoARM has been so dominant in the mobile market that there has been a lot of effort around ARM optimisations, both in compilers and interpreted languages. Way more so than alternative architectures like MIPS etc.
- ianopolous 7y agoIn a previous job, we had a cross compiler that cross/decompiled a static x86 Linux binary to Java bytecode (with syscalls emulated in Java). Testing this on an ARM processor the Java version of a scientific benchmark we were using was significantly faster (1.6X) than the best gcc could do with the original C. This wasn't anything fancy our cross-compiler had done, but the JVM itself. This isn't a comparison to x86 hardware, just an indication of the effort put into the ARM based JVM.
- lallysingh 7y agox86's age and complexity give it a significant disadvantage. Both the cache coherency model and the instruction set incur a lot of overhead to do at speed.
- atdt 7y agoThat's very interesting. Could you elaborate?
- pankajdoharey 7y agoAny possibility of Graviton or ARM based computers hitting the main stream computing devices like Laptops aswell?
- wmf 7y agoMicrosoft and Qualcomm are selling ARM laptops.
- pankajdoharey 7y agoThose are probably using a smartphone processors, the die-size alone of Graviton2 makes it desktop/server class.
- marton78 7y agoWill it be avail available on Fargate?
- wyldfire 7y agoHmm, so did Qualcomm miss out on a huge sales opportunity by bowing out? Or did they luck out not having to compete against vertical integration?