9 ms·

A Peek Into Graviton2

140 points by adwn 7y ago

Tehchops 7y ago
Those cost-points will be hard to argue with for those who need "good-enough" performance.
brenden2 7y ago
I tried to use ARM instances on AWS, and I discovered a lot of things just don't work. For example, launching an EKS cluster with ARM nodes requires a bunch of hacks, and you can't really do anything useful with it yet. The instances are also not properly supported by Terraform. I'm excited for ARM because of the pressure it will put on Intel, and also because of the cost savings. However it seems like AWS has a lot of work to do to make it useful.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Without good support for at least the following: - docker - kubernetes - go - rust - python - node - .net core - java - C/C++ It won't catch on... Not being able to buy one of these systems also has the issue of platform developers coming up short in terms of adapting tooling for the above list.
  - jonathannorris 7y ago
    A lot more of those things work than you might expect. I was able to get a very large node app working on their ARM instances very quickly... Docker support is also there from as far I know.
  - BinaryArcher 7y ago
    It supports all of the above. In AWS there is one extra step to deploy it than an Intel cluster. And that's only because it is in preview.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I wasn't indicating that any of them didn't work... I frankly didn't know... Only pointing out the most widely used software platforms.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    What's required for all these to be supported is just developers being able to buy 64-bit ARMv8 processors running a standard 64-bit Linux kernel, not necessarily the exact same processor Amazon has. And the Raspberry Pi 3B is an inexpensive 64-bit ARMv8 processor which can run a standard 64-bit Linux kernel. Sure, it's ARMv8.0 instead of ARMv8.2, but as mentioned in the article software compiled for ARMv8.0 works fine on ARMv8.2.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      Okay, I wasn't aware of that... all the same, would be nice to be able to actually buy one to work against. The list of supported platforms and being able to develop (near-locally) are what are really needed. Haven't really looked into it... it's on my todo list to look at cross-platform builds to target Raspberry Pi devices, will probably setup containerized cross platform builds for at least node, rust and .net core for my own use.
NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Shame EPYC2 wasn't included, but extremeley impressive numbers. Also I haven't used Anandtech in a while, but it hasn't changed much at all after their redesign a while back. I'm a fan of how it hasn't changed much. Nice and simple, though a bit more social media stuff that I remember.
- bluedino 7y ago
  I really miss their Mac reviews. What they did was immensely better than anyone since.
- skavi 7y ago
  If you turn off your ad blocker, you’ll see they’ve actually massively increased the amount and presence of their ads.
- thedance 7y ago
  Yes, they just published this article that compares two cloud server platforms based on how many times per hour they can run SPEC, which is totally on-brand for them and either a new low in the art of server benchmarking or a wry attempt at self-deprecation.
walrus01 7y ago
It's unfortunate to see CPU+motherboard platforms that are entirely unavailable to purchase and own yourself. There is a real need for people who want to do development/test with on-premises servers, and then migrate the end product to an AWS or similar environment. At least with AMD64 you can reliably do this.
- kick 7y ago
  We at Amazon want you to test on Amazon's servers! After all, Jeff Bezos owns every server on the planet. Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the rage, nowadays! That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡ ﹡Restrictions may apply. Not valid in the state of California or to companies registered in Delaware. We reserve the right to change the terms of the agreement without prior notice.
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    > that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison. My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.
    - tedunangst 7y ago
      How much data center does one really need for a build server?
ParadisoShlee 7y ago
I'm looking forward to the next SOC release with ARM 8.4 for the Pointer Auth.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Pointer authentication is part of ARMv8.3.
brianolson 7y ago
Your next AWS instance might be ARM. I'll have to test my specific workload, but for 40% more compute-per-dollar I'm interested.
- notatoad 7y ago
  If i'm remembering the previous ARM announcements correctly, you probably already have an ARM instance somewhere in your stack - they were going to be transitioning a lot of stuff like ELBs over to these processors.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Sensible; if the price/perf ratio is good then AWS would be kinda dumb not to move all their internal stuff to use it. And they control the whole stack and don't expose internals to users for their own services (ELBs, Route 53, probably RDS, etc), so it should be relatively straightforward from an engineering perspective.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Yes they intend to transit all of their Services, as well as SaaS on top of their ARM instances. Although they said this is going to take up to 5 years or more ( usual downplay from Amazon as with everything they do ), I bet they have a much more aggressive schedule.
whalesalad 7y ago
For those of you considering alternate instance types remember that it it is important to do scientific benchmarks. I just completed a us-west to us-east migration for a client because after a lengthy benchmark session we learned that the instances we really needed for our specific workload could not be AMD based. I tried a handful of AMD boxes and sent them through the ringer, but the Intel boxes always came out on top. The cost of these is significantly lower in us-east, hence the migration. Not to knock AMD, but in the presented configuration from AWS the comparative Intel<>AMD instance types vary greatly. There is also no compute-heavy instance type from AMD at this time (AFAIK please correct me). For reference our workload is network (outside AWS), Compute and RAM heavy. The c5.2xlarge seems to be the sweet spot as far as cost/performance. So if you’re considering Graviton, make sure to design and run some real benchmarks. For us (in the AMD scenario) things looked real good on paper but after benchmarking the performance was not there.
- sfshaw 7y ago
  Do any tools exist for easily benchmarking one's workload across various instance types?
  - whalesalad 7y ago
    You’ll have to design that based on your workload and requirements.
- opencl 7y ago
  The compute-focused AMD instances (c5a and c5ad) based on 2nd gen Epyc were announced as launching "soon" back in November, haven't heard anything about them since.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Which is the question I keep throwing but without an answer. The EPYC 2 was previewed in early 2019 and I would not be surprised if All three major cloud provider has had samples since. And it has been 12 months without much action. AMD's projection of their Server Market growth aren't exactly encouraging either.
tedunangst 7y ago
Did AWS lift an embargo this week?
- wmf 7y ago
  They just seem to be slowly onboarding people for m6g.
gautamcgoel 7y ago
I want to buy one... I doubt Amazon will ever sell Graviton chops directly to consumers, but the article says the chip is essentially an underclocked reference design using ARM N1 cores, so other vendors could offer essentially identical chips.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gok 7y ago
"Cost Analysis - An x86 Massacre" Quite a headline
- traskjd 7y ago
  RISC is good.
bluedino 7y ago
I've had a disdain for SPEC benchmarks for a long time. It was always what workstation makers or Apple (PowerPC Apple) used to show how much faster their chips were than Intel-even though it never really panned out. Would a more AWS-oriented benchmark suite make more sense? Test Java, run PHP/Ruby/Python/Node, see how many pages you can serve with Apache/NGINX, run queries in MariaDB/Postgres, see how much you can stick through Mongo/Redis...
- enitihas 7y ago
  So Techempower style benchmark?
  - dnpp123 7y ago
    Those are worst IMHO - when you look at the tricks used by top performers to look good, it does not reflect real life situation at all.
fancyfredbot 7y ago
Intel (and so x86) has had a manufacturing node advantage over most other processor manufacturers for a long time. They do not have that advantage currently. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before another instruction set became competitive.
rrss 7y ago
The article discusses the new synchronization extensions and indicates they were added in v8.1: > it means that they also implement the v8.1 ISA which add new instructions such as atomic compare-and-set (CAS). > you should pay very close attention to make sure your software stack is compiled against Arm v8.1 or higher (N1 is v8.2). But my understanding is that the new atomics are in an extension, so just compiling to v8.1 may not get the new atomics. Anyone know what the situation here is? What has to happen to get the compiler to use LSE atomics?

140 points by adwn 7y ago

Those cost-points will be hard to argue with for those who need "good-enough" performance.

I tried to use ARM instances on AWS, and I discovered a lot of things just don't work. For example, launching an EKS cluster with ARM nodes requires a bunch of hacks, and you can't really do anything useful with it yet. The instances are also not properly supported by Terraform. I'm excited for ARM because of the pressure it will put on Intel, and also because of the cost savings. However it seems like AWS has a lot of work to do to make it useful.

tracker1 7y ago
Without good support for at least the following: - docker - kubernetes - go - rust - python - node - .net core - java - C/C++ It won't catch on... Not being able to buy one of these systems also has the issue of platform developers coming up short in terms of adapting tooling for the above list.
- jonathannorris 7y ago
  A lot more of those things work than you might expect. I was able to get a very large node app working on their ARM instances very quickly... Docker support is also there from as far I know.
- BinaryArcher 7y ago
  It supports all of the above. In AWS there is one extra step to deploy it than an Intel cluster. And that's only because it is in preview.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I wasn't indicating that any of them didn't work... I frankly didn't know... Only pointing out the most widely used software platforms.
- cesarb 7y ago
  What's required for all these to be supported is just developers being able to buy 64-bit ARMv8 processors running a standard 64-bit Linux kernel, not necessarily the exact same processor Amazon has. And the Raspberry Pi 3B is an inexpensive 64-bit ARMv8 processor which can run a standard 64-bit Linux kernel. Sure, it's ARMv8.0 instead of ARMv8.2, but as mentioned in the article software compiled for ARMv8.0 works fine on ARMv8.2.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Okay, I wasn't aware of that... all the same, would be nice to be able to actually buy one to work against. The list of supported platforms and being able to develop (near-locally) are what are really needed. Haven't really looked into it... it's on my todo list to look at cross-platform builds to target Raspberry Pi devices, will probably setup containerized cross platform builds for at least node, rust and .net core for my own use.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

Shame EPYC2 wasn't included, but extremeley impressive numbers. Also I haven't used Anandtech in a while, but it hasn't changed much at all after their redesign a while back. I'm a fan of how it hasn't changed much. Nice and simple, though a bit more social media stuff that I remember.

bluedino 7y ago
I really miss their Mac reviews. What they did was immensely better than anyone since.
skavi 7y ago
If you turn off your ad blocker, you’ll see they’ve actually massively increased the amount and presence of their ads.
thedance 7y ago
Yes, they just published this article that compares two cloud server platforms based on how many times per hour they can run SPEC, which is totally on-brand for them and either a new low in the art of server benchmarking or a wry attempt at self-deprecation.

walrus01 7y ago

It's unfortunate to see CPU+motherboard platforms that are entirely unavailable to purchase and own yourself. There is a real need for people who want to do development/test with on-premises servers, and then migrate the end product to an AWS or similar environment. At least with AMD64 you can reliably do this.

kick 7y ago
We at Amazon want you to test on Amazon's servers! After all, Jeff Bezos owns every server on the planet. Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the rage, nowadays! That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡ ﹡Restrictions may apply. Not valid in the state of California or to companies registered in Delaware. We reserve the right to change the terms of the agreement without prior notice.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  > that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison. My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    How much data center does one really need for a build server?

ParadisoShlee 7y ago

I'm looking forward to the next SOC release with ARM 8.4 for the Pointer Auth.

saagarjha 7y ago
Pointer authentication is part of ARMv8.3.

brianolson 7y ago

Your next AWS instance might be ARM. I'll have to test my specific workload, but for 40% more compute-per-dollar I'm interested.

notatoad 7y ago
If i'm remembering the previous ARM announcements correctly, you probably already have an ARM instance somewhere in your stack - they were going to be transitioning a lot of stuff like ELBs over to these processors.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Sensible; if the price/perf ratio is good then AWS would be kinda dumb not to move all their internal stuff to use it. And they control the whole stack and don't expose internals to users for their own services (ELBs, Route 53, probably RDS, etc), so it should be relatively straightforward from an engineering perspective.
- ksec 7y ago
  Yes they intend to transit all of their Services, as well as SaaS on top of their ARM instances. Although they said this is going to take up to 5 years or more ( usual downplay from Amazon as with everything they do ), I bet they have a much more aggressive schedule.

whalesalad 7y ago

For those of you considering alternate instance types remember that it it is important to do scientific benchmarks. I just completed a us-west to us-east migration for a client because after a lengthy benchmark session we learned that the instances we really needed for our specific workload could not be AMD based. I tried a handful of AMD boxes and sent them through the ringer, but the Intel boxes always came out on top. The cost of these is significantly lower in us-east, hence the migration. Not to knock AMD, but in the presented configuration from AWS the comparative Intel<>AMD instance types vary greatly. There is also no compute-heavy instance type from AMD at this time (AFAIK please correct me). For reference our workload is network (outside AWS), Compute and RAM heavy. The c5.2xlarge seems to be the sweet spot as far as cost/performance. So if you’re considering Graviton, make sure to design and run some real benchmarks. For us (in the AMD scenario) things looked real good on paper but after benchmarking the performance was not there.

sfshaw 7y ago
Do any tools exist for easily benchmarking one's workload across various instance types?
- whalesalad 7y ago
  You’ll have to design that based on your workload and requirements.
opencl 7y ago
The compute-focused AMD instances (c5a and c5ad) based on 2nd gen Epyc were announced as launching "soon" back in November, haven't heard anything about them since.
- ksec 7y ago
  Which is the question I keep throwing but without an answer. The EPYC 2 was previewed in early 2019 and I would not be surprised if All three major cloud provider has had samples since. And it has been 12 months without much action. AMD's projection of their Server Market growth aren't exactly encouraging either.

tedunangst 7y ago

Did AWS lift an embargo this week?

wmf 7y ago
They just seem to be slowly onboarding people for m6g.

gautamcgoel 7y ago

I want to buy one... I doubt Amazon will ever sell Graviton chops directly to consumers, but the article says the chip is essentially an underclocked reference design using ARM N1 cores, so other vendors could offer essentially identical chips.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gok 7y ago

"Cost Analysis - An x86 Massacre" Quite a headline

traskjd 7y ago
RISC is good.

bluedino 7y ago

I've had a disdain for SPEC benchmarks for a long time. It was always what workstation makers or Apple (PowerPC Apple) used to show how much faster their chips were than Intel-even though it never really panned out. Would a more AWS-oriented benchmark suite make more sense? Test Java, run PHP/Ruby/Python/Node, see how many pages you can serve with Apache/NGINX, run queries in MariaDB/Postgres, see how much you can stick through Mongo/Redis...

enitihas 7y ago
So Techempower style benchmark?
- dnpp123 7y ago
  Those are worst IMHO - when you look at the tricks used by top performers to look good, it does not reflect real life situation at all.

fancyfredbot 7y ago

Intel (and so x86) has had a manufacturing node advantage over most other processor manufacturers for a long time. They do not have that advantage currently. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before another instruction set became competitive.

rrss 7y ago

The article discusses the new synchronization extensions and indicates they were added in v8.1: > it means that they also implement the v8.1 ISA which add new instructions such as atomic compare-and-set (CAS). > you should pay very close attention to make sure your software stack is compiled against Arm v8.1 or higher (N1 is v8.2). But my understanding is that the new atomics are in an extension, so just compiling to v8.1 may not get the new atomics. Anyone know what the situation here is? What has to happen to get the compiler to use LSE atomics?