10 ms·

> Here’s comparative data between M6g and M5, the previous generation instance type Instead of comparing the 7nm Graviton2 processor against an 14nm Intel proc

> Here’s comparative data between M6g and M5, the previous generation instance type Instead of comparing the 7nm Graviton2 processor against an 14nm Intel processor, I'd like to see its performance compared to an AMD Epyc 2 processor, which would be a more apples-to-apples comparison as both are "7nm" parts. Unfortunately Epyc 2 processors aren't available from AWS yet (but are already announced: https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered-compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-pow...).

Rapzid 7y ago
This is what I'm curious about as epyc currently represents the state of the art x86 right? What's the TCO comparison when factoring in performance, density, and power?
reitzensteinm 7y ago
You're putting way too much emphasis on process tech. TSMC 7nm is roughly equivalent to Intel 10nm, so it's only a generation behind. Intel 10nm products, where available, have also not exactly been lighting the world on fire with their performance.
- tpurves 7y ago
  No. Process tech is profoundly correlated to cpu performance. It’s literallly the definition of Moore’s law. Intel has no 10nm server processors. Intel’s near 5 year delay in getting past 14nm has opened a huge window of opportunity to competitors both AMD and amazon/arm. It is highly worth comparing these competitors apple to apple vs Intel’s oranges.
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    "No." yourself :) Smaller processes used to mean higher frequency switching, lower power and increased density. With the death of Dennard scaling, we mostly just get the latter. This means that the benefit is now largely economic; you get largely the same chips, you can just pack them more tightly on the wafer. If you're one node behind, you still price the chips at a price the market will bear, they just cost you a bit more to produce. And maybe not even then; mature last generation nodes perform pretty damn well against immature next generation nodes once you take yield and performance in to account. Intel's 14nm transition yielded Broadwell Xeon [1], barely any improvement over the Haswell chips. Haswell itself, however, gave us a ~50% performance boost on the same process node. This is the difference between a new process node and a new architecture in today's world. The reason Intel is in trouble is because of the 10nm fiasco, but not because of the lack of a die shrink. Their shrinks have been working like a well oiled machine for decades, and there was no contingency in place for a large delay. All post Skylake chips were being developed tightly against their 10nm libraries, with no possibility of a back port. It's not the lack of a Haswell->Broadwell analogous die shrink that's hurting Intel, but a Haswell->Broadwell->Skylake die shrink + new architecture. How do you know this is true? Because Intel switched gears and is now decoupling future architectures from die shrinks. If they did this earlier, you'd be seeing Ice Lake (or maybe Tiger Lake) on 14nm++ as an answer to Zen 2, and it would be a pretty good chip. Instead they're doing whatever minor tweaks they can to so many variations of Skylake I'm not sure I could list all the codenames from memory. Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slower than a spill to DRAM. You can't disentangle the shrink from the architecture, because they happened simultaneously. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-re... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-xeon-e5-version-3-up-to-18-haswell-ep-cores- https://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-xeon-e5-version-3-...
    - Dunedan 7y ago
      > Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slower than a spill to DRAM. You can't disentangle the shrink from the architecture, because they happened simultaneously. AMD seems to disagree. In their "Next Horizon Gaming Tech Day General Session" last year they claimed that ~40% of the Zen 2 performance improvements came from "Design Frequency and 7nm Process", while the remaining ~60% are from "IPC-Enhancements" ([1] slide 13). As the frequency is directly related to the process it's obvious that moving to TSMC's 7nm process played a pretty important role for the performance improvements. [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR
      - reitzensteinm 7y ago
        60% is most, where exactly is the disagreement?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Everything I know about process tech says that they're not strictly comparable like that between these different processors. Was that wrong?
- Dunedan 7y ago
  That's why I quoted 7nm. I'm aware of the process differences and Intel's severe and continuing problems with their 10nm process. My point being that if you want to compare a state-of-the-art ARM CPU, you should compare it to a state-of-the-art x86 CPU and Intel's CPU's are simply not state-of-the-art at the moment.
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    To the degree that they're not state of the art (and I think you're overselling that, Intel does pretty well core for core), it's not at all because of 7nm TSMC vs 14nm Intel. Intel would be doing just fine with a 14nm Ice Lake.
awill 7y ago
If Epyc CPUs aren't available, then it isn't apples to apples. A customer doesn't care about nm. They care about what's available. The apples to apples comparison is The best x86 available vs the best ARM available.
- jrockway 7y ago
  You can buy Epyc v2 CPUs from Newegg. It's just that AWS doesn't have instance types that use them.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > It's just that AWS doesn't have instance types that use them. AWS offers instance types with Epyc CPUs https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
    - jrockway 7y ago
      Yeah, but not second generation Epyc. Their blog says the instance type will be called C5a: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered-compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powere... Right now, according to the official C5a page, they are "coming soon".
- rumanator 7y ago
  > If Epyc CPUs aren't available, You can buy Epyc CPUs right now even from Amazon, and you can even use Epyc CPUs in EC2 instances.
  - Dunedan 7y ago
    Those are AMD Epyc 1 CPU's, which are built using a 14nm process at GlobalFoundries. Epyc 2 CPU's, which are significantly faster, are announced to be available at AWS in future, but aren't yet.
    - 7y ago

Rapzid 7y ago

This is what I'm curious about as epyc currently represents the state of the art x86 right? What's the TCO comparison when factoring in performance, density, and power?

reitzensteinm 7y ago

You're putting way too much emphasis on process tech. TSMC 7nm is roughly equivalent to Intel 10nm, so it's only a generation behind. Intel 10nm products, where available, have also not exactly been lighting the world on fire with their performance.

tpurves 7y ago
No. Process tech is profoundly correlated to cpu performance. It’s literallly the definition of Moore’s law. Intel has no 10nm server processors. Intel’s near 5 year delay in getting past 14nm has opened a huge window of opportunity to competitors both AMD and amazon/arm. It is highly worth comparing these competitors apple to apple vs Intel’s oranges.
- reitzensteinm 7y ago
  "No." yourself :) Smaller processes used to mean higher frequency switching, lower power and increased density. With the death of Dennard scaling, we mostly just get the latter. This means that the benefit is now largely economic; you get largely the same chips, you can just pack them more tightly on the wafer. If you're one node behind, you still price the chips at a price the market will bear, they just cost you a bit more to produce. And maybe not even then; mature last generation nodes perform pretty damn well against immature next generation nodes once you take yield and performance in to account. Intel's 14nm transition yielded Broadwell Xeon [1], barely any improvement over the Haswell chips. Haswell itself, however, gave us a ~50% performance boost on the same process node. This is the difference between a new process node and a new architecture in today's world. The reason Intel is in trouble is because of the 10nm fiasco, but not because of the lack of a die shrink. Their shrinks have been working like a well oiled machine for decades, and there was no contingency in place for a large delay. All post Skylake chips were being developed tightly against their 10nm libraries, with no possibility of a back port. It's not the lack of a Haswell->Broadwell analogous die shrink that's hurting Intel, but a Haswell->Broadwell->Skylake die shrink + new architecture. How do you know this is true? Because Intel switched gears and is now decoupling future architectures from die shrinks. If they did this earlier, you'd be seeing Ice Lake (or maybe Tiger Lake) on 14nm++ as an answer to Zen 2, and it would be a pretty good chip. Instead they're doing whatever minor tweaks they can to so many variations of Skylake I'm not sure I could list all the codenames from memory. Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slower than a spill to DRAM. You can't disentangle the shrink from the architecture, because they happened simultaneously. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-re... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-xeon-e5-version-3-up-to-18-haswell-ep-cores- https://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-xeon-e5-version-3-...
  - Dunedan 7y ago
    > Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slower than a spill to DRAM. You can't disentangle the shrink from the architecture, because they happened simultaneously. AMD seems to disagree. In their "Next Horizon Gaming Tech Day General Session" last year they claimed that ~40% of the Zen 2 performance improvements came from "Design Frequency and 7nm Process", while the remaining ~60% are from "IPC-Enhancements" ([1] slide 13). As the frequency is directly related to the process it's obvious that moving to TSMC's 7nm process played a pretty important role for the performance improvements. [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR
    - reitzensteinm 7y ago
      60% is most, where exactly is the disagreement?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Everything I know about process tech says that they're not strictly comparable like that between these different processors. Was that wrong?
Dunedan 7y ago
That's why I quoted 7nm. I'm aware of the process differences and Intel's severe and continuing problems with their 10nm process. My point being that if you want to compare a state-of-the-art ARM CPU, you should compare it to a state-of-the-art x86 CPU and Intel's CPU's are simply not state-of-the-art at the moment.
- reitzensteinm 7y ago
  To the degree that they're not state of the art (and I think you're overselling that, Intel does pretty well core for core), it's not at all because of 7nm TSMC vs 14nm Intel. Intel would be doing just fine with a 14nm Ice Lake.

awill 7y ago

If Epyc CPUs aren't available, then it isn't apples to apples. A customer doesn't care about nm. They care about what's available. The apples to apples comparison is The best x86 available vs the best ARM available.

jrockway 7y ago
You can buy Epyc v2 CPUs from Newegg. It's just that AWS doesn't have instance types that use them.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > It's just that AWS doesn't have instance types that use them. AWS offers instance types with Epyc CPUs https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
  - jrockway 7y ago
    Yeah, but not second generation Epyc. Their blog says the instance type will be called C5a: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered-compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powere... Right now, according to the official C5a page, they are "coming soon".
rumanator 7y ago
> If Epyc CPUs aren't available, You can buy Epyc CPUs right now even from Amazon, and you can even use Epyc CPUs in EC2 instances.
- Dunedan 7y ago
  Those are AMD Epyc 1 CPU's, which are built using a 14nm process at GlobalFoundries. Epyc 2 CPU's, which are significantly faster, are announced to be available at AWS in future, but aren't yet.
  - 7y ago