5 ms·

The Graviton chips are just ARM reference designs with a few tiny modifications, very little R&D required. The majority of the NRE costs were probably the 7nm

by opencl 6y ago

The Graviton chips are just ARM reference designs with a few tiny modifications, very little R&D required. The majority of the NRE costs were probably the 7nm tapeout which is supposedly in the 10s of millions dollar range. Anandtech ran a pretty good article on the Graviton2 and its Neoverse N1 cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

baybal2 6y ago
> 7nm tapeout which is supposedly in the 10s of millions dollar range. Yes. Cookie cutter SoCs stopped making money at around 65nm node. You need to put more on the table these days than just bare ARM cores and generic peripherals to sell a SoC. Many dotcoms that ventured into chipmaking are now quietly bailing out. Making your own chips just to undercut Intel is a stupid idea. People tried it before more times than I can count. Just remember all of RISC epopeias from nineties. Where are SPARC, PARISC, PPC, MIPS now? The fact that they use ARM instead of any other RISC core makes little difference. Internet companies are too small to make money from undercutting chipmakers, but I believe they are not that far away from that point. Maybe in 10 years or so, you will be working on a PC with Genuine Google(R) chip
- scarface74 6y ago
  That’s not really a valid comparison. The market for chips was a lot smaller as was the volume. Who knows how many chips that Amazon and Google use for their own servers. They have to use more internally than the number of PPC chips that IBM and Motorola sold at its height. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have made sense for Apple to design their own chips for Macs, but they sell 200-250 million ARM based devices a year.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > Who knows how many chips that Amazon and Google use for their own servers. No amount I can imagine can pay off for the tapeout on the latest node for them. All dotcoms taken together make for single digit percentage of wafer output for both Intel, or AMD. Apple doesn't make money on chips, they make money off their devices. An A13 may well not make them money, but the whole Iphone does.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      And Amazon doesn’t make money off chips. It makes money selling services that run on chips. They both sell integrated products. But, we also aren’t talking about all chips. Just server class chips. Energy cost is also a very real cost at the scale of the cloud vendors. If they can decrease the overall cost and the cost/per watt. It’s a win.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      I doubt it. The A13 and successors are money printing machines. Apple has always been about limiting SKUs to maximize their economies of scale. The original iMac was a great example of this... although they had no market share, they had like 3 SKUs vs HP and Dell who had dozens or hundreds of different PCs. It was the biggest selling model of computer at the time, and they make money on it because of that scale. They do the same thing with the iPhone today. The SE has the same guts as the flagship SKU, which is in turn faster than any competing product. The control of the roadmap and capabilities of the CPUs is a huge competitive advantage that makes a lot of money. They save money on things they don’t control like batteries because the faster CPU uses less power, etc. Everyone else is stuck with whatever garbage Qualcomm is dishing out. Amazon is in a similar place. There remains a lot of on-premise server compute that AWS wants to conquer. You need to think about their actions today in terms of what they mean in 2030.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Just to add on. Amazon frequently talks about only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud provider.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        Exactly. I work in the enterprise space, and we are the frog in the slowly boiling water. In 2009, cloud email was unthinkable, in 2012, on-prem email was unthinkable. Most compute workloads are the same, and the sorry state of the legacy hardware companies is testament to that. HPE sold off its field services to Unisys, the Dell conglomerate exists (owing to the collapse in valuation of once mighty EMC), IBM is whatever IBM has become, etc. Oracle essentially doesn’t pay salespeople for selling traditional software. At some point, more enterprise workloads just won’t be feasible anywhere but cloud. The stupid government or a bank will pay a few FTEs to swap parts for $1M/year, but everyone else will have moved to cloud.
- jsnell 6y ago
  You maybe aren't appreciating the scale of the cloud companies properly. In 2019, Amazon had 6x the Capex of AMD's entire revenue. Google 4x, Microsoft 3x. Obviously all of that Capex isn't for compute, but given the cost structure of servers, a significant chunk will be. If AMD can profitably build and sell a state of the art CPU in the world with that scale, why couldn't the cloud companies be able to?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > why couldn't the cloud companies be able to? That's easy to say, now think of why other companies with n-times money "can't simply do that"? It takes quite a lot of effort, and skill: execution capability. GAF companies are easy money companies, they, and their executives are not made for that.
    - jsnell 6y ago
      But your initial argument wasn't about competence, it was an economic argument about scale. To quote, "the internet companies are too small", "No amount I can imagine can pay off for the tapeout on the latest node for them". Given you've pivoted away from the economics to claiming that they just can't do it, how do you explain the results from this article? Shouldn't Amazon have been too incompetent to build a state of the art server CPU? How about Google's TPUs, in-house switches, and in-house NIC ASICs? Just failed prestige projects?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Making your own chips just to undercut Intel is a stupid idea. I think a particular fruit company would disagree?

by opencl 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago

> 7nm tapeout which is supposedly in the 10s of millions dollar range. Yes. Cookie cutter SoCs stopped making money at around 65nm node. You need to put more on the table these days than just bare ARM cores and generic peripherals to sell a SoC. Many dotcoms that ventured into chipmaking are now quietly bailing out. Making your own chips just to undercut Intel is a stupid idea. People tried it before more times than I can count. Just remember all of RISC epopeias from nineties. Where are SPARC, PARISC, PPC, MIPS now? The fact that they use ARM instead of any other RISC core makes little difference. Internet companies are too small to make money from undercutting chipmakers, but I believe they are not that far away from that point. Maybe in 10 years or so, you will be working on a PC with Genuine Google(R) chip

scarface74 6y ago
That’s not really a valid comparison. The market for chips was a lot smaller as was the volume. Who knows how many chips that Amazon and Google use for their own servers. They have to use more internally than the number of PPC chips that IBM and Motorola sold at its height. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have made sense for Apple to design their own chips for Macs, but they sell 200-250 million ARM based devices a year.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Who knows how many chips that Amazon and Google use for their own servers. No amount I can imagine can pay off for the tapeout on the latest node for them. All dotcoms taken together make for single digit percentage of wafer output for both Intel, or AMD. Apple doesn't make money on chips, they make money off their devices. An A13 may well not make them money, but the whole Iphone does.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And Amazon doesn’t make money off chips. It makes money selling services that run on chips. They both sell integrated products. But, we also aren’t talking about all chips. Just server class chips. Energy cost is also a very real cost at the scale of the cloud vendors. If they can decrease the overall cost and the cost/per watt. It’s a win.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    I doubt it. The A13 and successors are money printing machines. Apple has always been about limiting SKUs to maximize their economies of scale. The original iMac was a great example of this... although they had no market share, they had like 3 SKUs vs HP and Dell who had dozens or hundreds of different PCs. It was the biggest selling model of computer at the time, and they make money on it because of that scale. They do the same thing with the iPhone today. The SE has the same guts as the flagship SKU, which is in turn faster than any competing product. The control of the roadmap and capabilities of the CPUs is a huge competitive advantage that makes a lot of money. They save money on things they don’t control like batteries because the faster CPU uses less power, etc. Everyone else is stuck with whatever garbage Qualcomm is dishing out. Amazon is in a similar place. There remains a lot of on-premise server compute that AWS wants to conquer. You need to think about their actions today in terms of what they mean in 2030.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Just to add on. Amazon frequently talks about only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud provider.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        Exactly. I work in the enterprise space, and we are the frog in the slowly boiling water. In 2009, cloud email was unthinkable, in 2012, on-prem email was unthinkable. Most compute workloads are the same, and the sorry state of the legacy hardware companies is testament to that. HPE sold off its field services to Unisys, the Dell conglomerate exists (owing to the collapse in valuation of once mighty EMC), IBM is whatever IBM has become, etc. Oracle essentially doesn’t pay salespeople for selling traditional software. At some point, more enterprise workloads just won’t be feasible anywhere but cloud. The stupid government or a bank will pay a few FTEs to swap parts for $1M/year, but everyone else will have moved to cloud.
jsnell 6y ago
You maybe aren't appreciating the scale of the cloud companies properly. In 2019, Amazon had 6x the Capex of AMD's entire revenue. Google 4x, Microsoft 3x. Obviously all of that Capex isn't for compute, but given the cost structure of servers, a significant chunk will be. If AMD can profitably build and sell a state of the art CPU in the world with that scale, why couldn't the cloud companies be able to?
- baybal2 6y ago
  > why couldn't the cloud companies be able to? That's easy to say, now think of why other companies with n-times money "can't simply do that"? It takes quite a lot of effort, and skill: execution capability. GAF companies are easy money companies, they, and their executives are not made for that.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    But your initial argument wasn't about competence, it was an economic argument about scale. To quote, "the internet companies are too small", "No amount I can imagine can pay off for the tapeout on the latest node for them". Given you've pivoted away from the economics to claiming that they just can't do it, how do you explain the results from this article? Shouldn't Amazon have been too incompetent to build a state of the art server CPU? How about Google's TPUs, in-house switches, and in-house NIC ASICs? Just failed prestige projects?
saagarjha 6y ago
> Making your own chips just to undercut Intel is a stupid idea. I think a particular fruit company would disagree?