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Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. I keep searching for

Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. I keep searching for "Graviton" in these thinkpieces. I keep getting "no results found." Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. And Amazon's Graviton2 VMs are best in class for price-performance. As Anandtech said: If you’re an EC2 customer today, and unless you’re tied to x86 for whatever reason, you’d be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances once they become available, as the cost savings will be significant. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/10 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

fluffything 6y ago
> Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. If you develop for Mac, chances are you want your CI to use the same target hardware, which means cloud ARM hardware to run Mac VMs.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Except you’re not going to be selling access to a Mac VM running on Graviton anytime soon.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Chances indeed, but given how a lot of software is written in crossplatform languages (Java, JS, Ruby, etc) or the underlying CPU hardware is abstracted away (most compiled languages), I like to think it doesn't really matter except in edge cases and / or libraries. Wishful thinking though, probably.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I can abstract away the OS (mostly), but I can’t abstract away the ISA without paying a pretty hefty performance cost.
underdeserver 6y ago
Exactly. Yes, some people need memory and multi-core speeds, but for most, it's the cost per "good enough" instance, and that's CapEx and power, both of which could be much lower with ARM.
- dannyw 6y ago
  If you need multi-core speeds, you'd be silly to not go AMD Epyc (~50% cheaper), or ARM. People paid the IBM tax for decades. Intel is the new IBM. Wherever you look, Intel's lineup is not competitive and it is only surviving due to inertia.
  - bgorman 6y ago
    It isn't quite that simple, Intel has way more engineering resources than AMD and for some complicated setups like data centers, Intel really does have good arguments that their systems are better tested than the competition, and Intel does have better ability to bundle products together than AMD.
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      > their systems are better tested than the competition Yes, Spectrum and Meltdown definitely proves that... I think I heard that argument already, in the 90's. But instead of Intel it was Sun, it was SGI, it was Digital, etc The truth is that money wins and while there is an inertia, it's more like a Cartoon inertia where your guy won't fall from the cliff until he looks down. But then it's too late.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Intel is behind in fab technology. I don't think the problem is that Intel's chip designs are what's holding them back. AMD offered better multi core performance and Intel responded with more cores as well. However, I do believe that Intel suffers from an awful corporate environment. There was a story about ISPC [0] with one chapter [1] talking about the culture at the company. [0] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html [1] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/28/ispc-talks-and-departure.html https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/28/ispc-talks-and-depart...
lostmsu 6y ago
Pedantic: actually, cloud ARM VMs and ARM laptops mean eventual Mac ARM laptops. The former two are already widespread in Graviton2 you mentioned and Surface X and also 3rd party ones.
- dis-sys 6y ago
  there is no mainstream ARM laptop as of writing. what are my options if I want a ARM laptop with say good mobile processor performance close to the i7-8850H found in a 2018 mbp 15, 16GB RAM and 512GB NVME SSD to setup my day to day dev environment (Linux + Golang + C++ etc)? surface x is the only ARM laptop you can easily purchase, but it is windows only and the processor is way too slow. there is also close to 0 response from app vendors to bring their apps to native ARM windows environment.
  - ladyanita22 6y ago
    How is the X slow? The reviewers have only claimed it was slow when emulating x86, but not in native apps.
    - valuearb 6y ago
      Not sure how slow it’s ARM processor is in actual use, but we know it’s far slower than Apple ARM CPUs.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    AFAIK, you can game on Surface X without much issue. There are numerous YouTube videos of popular games doing 60 FPS on descent settings. Apple fans just seem to be in denial about being late to the game. I have to admit, the Apple's ARM processors will likely be significantly faster per core. But they are not the driver of the switch to ARM. If anything, Chromebooks were.
mtgx 6y ago
> Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. Also this sounds like a classic innovator's dilemma for Intel to make. "Forget about all of this low-margin/lower-end stuff. Let's just focus on the higher-end/higher-profitable products. What could possibly go wrong?"
bubblethink 6y ago
>Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. What is the connection here ? ARM servers would be fine in a separate discussion. What does it have to do with Macs ? Macs aren't harbingers of anything. They have set literally no trend in the last couple of decades, other than thinness at all costs. If you mean that developers will use Gravitons to develop mac apps, why/how would that be ?
- Torkel 6y ago
  To quote Linus Torvalds: "Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bull*t. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)." So I would argue there is a strong connection.
  - bubblethink 6y ago
    But that's the other way round. If you have an x86 PC, you can develop x86 cloud software easily. You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway (i.e., that's not apple's focus). You develop mac software on macs for other macs. If you have to develop cloud software, you'll do so on linux (or wsl or whatever). What is the grand plan here ? You'll run an arm linux vm on your mac to develop general cloud software which will be deployed on graviton ?
    - bigiain 6y ago
      > You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway I've got anecdata that says different. My backend/cloud team has been pretty evenly split between Mac and Windows (with only one Linux on the desktop user). This is at a Java shop (with legacy Grails codebases to maintain but not do any new development on).
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      > If you have to develop cloud software, you'll do so on linux (or wsl or whatever). I think you are vastly underestimating how many people use Mac (or use Windows without using WSL) to develop for the cloud.
sergeykish 6y ago
Everyone mentions Intel high margins on servers and somehow does not consider if Apple wants these margins too. > Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? > It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.
- wbl 6y ago
  Apple backed away from the server market years ago despite having a quite nice web solution.
- mshook 6y ago
  It was also because Intel was like this giant steamroller you couldn't compete with because it was also selling desktop CPUs. Sure they have lower margins on desktop but these brings sh!t tons of cash, cash you will then use for research and to develop your next desktop and server CPUs. If I believe this page [1], consumer CPUs brought almost $10 billions in 2019... In comparison, server CPUs generated $7 billions of revenues... And these days, Intel has like >90% of that market. Other players (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, ...) were playing in a walled garden and couldn't really compete on any of that (except pricing because their stuff was crazy expensive). So not only they were sharing the server market with Intel but Intel was most likely earning more than the sum of it all from their desktop CPUs... More money, more research, more progress shared between the consumer and server CPUs: rinse and repeat and eventually you will catch up. And also, they could sell their server CPUs for a lot less than their "boutique" competitors. You just can't compete with a player which has almost unlimited funds and executes well... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019....
reitzensteinm 6y ago
While Graviton is impressive and probably an indication of things to come, you can't outright use "Amazon rents them cheaper to me" as an indication of the price performance of the chips themselves. Amazon is exactly the kind of company that would take 50% margin on their x86 servers and 0% margin on their Graviton servers in order to engineer a long term shift that's in their favor - the end of x86 server duopoly (or monopoly depending on how the wind is blowing).
- delfinom 6y ago
  Long term, Amazon is also the exact kind of company that would start making "modifications" to Graviton requiring you to purchase/use/license a special compiler to run ;)
  - whoisthisfor 6y ago
    Can you point to a time Amazon did something like that? Not saying they won't, just any company can do it, it's more likely when they've done it in the past.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 013a 6y ago
  I don't feel as sure about this; there's very little evidence that Amazon is putting a "50% margin", or any significant percent, on x86 servers. Sure, they're more expensive than, just for comparisons' sake, Linode or DigitalOcean, but EC2 instances are also roughly the same cost per-core and per-gb as Azure compute instances, which is a far more accurate comparison. Many people complain about AWS' networking costs, but I also suspect these are generally at-cost. A typical AWS region has terabits upon terabits of nano-second scale latency fiber ran between its AZs and out to the wider internet. Networking is an exponential problem; AWS doesn't overcharge for egress, they just simply haven't invested in building a solution that sacrifices quality for cost. Amazon really does not have a history of throwing huge margins on raw compute resources. What Amazon does is build valuable software and services around those raw resources, then put huge margins on those products. EC2 and S3 are likely very close to 0% margin; but DynamoDB, EFS, Lambda, etc are much higher margin. I've found AWS Transfer for SFTP [1] to be the most egregious and actually exploitative example of this; it effectively puts an SFTP gateway in front of an S3 bucket, and they'll charge you $216/month + egress AND ingress at ~150% the standard egress rate for that benefit (SFTP layers additional egress charges on-top-of the standard AWS transfer rates). [1] https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I would suspect that Apple is likely to enforce exclusive hardware for ARM; just like it does now, for Intel (which is a lot more common than ARM). The limitation is not technical (as hackintoshes demonstrate); it’s legal. That said, it would be great to be able to run Mac software (and iOS) on server-based VMs. I just don’t think it will happen at scale, because lawyers.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
> you’d be stupid there's still a load of non scale-out services that the world depends upon.
panpanna 6y ago
> Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. Why do you think that? Cloud means linux, apple does not even have a server OS anymore. We are seeing some ARM devices entering the server space, but these have been in progress for ears and have absolutely nothing to do with apples (supposed) CPU switch.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  Why do you think developers don't run Linux VMs on macOS laptops?
  - imglorp 6y ago
    They absolutely do. One reason is to get the same environment they get in a cloud deployment scaled down. Another is Apple keeps messing with compatibility, most recent example being the code signing thing slowing down script executions. Edit, this includes docker on Mac: it's not native.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    When they run Docker that's precisely what they do...
anonymousDan 6y ago
Does anyone know if AWS Graviton supports TrustZone?
imtringued 6y ago
>you’d be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 You overestimate the AWS customer base. Lots of them do silly things that cost them a lot of money.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It's because AWS is designed in a such a way that it's very easy to spend a lot, and very difficult to know why.
  - jopsen 6y ago
    If you can throw money at the problem and invest engineering resources to do cost optimization later, this is often a valid strategy. It's often easy to test if scaling the instance size/count resolves a performance issue. If it does, you know you can fix the problem by burning money. When you have reasonable certainty of the outcome spending money is easier than engineering resources. And later it's easier for an engineer to justify performance optimizations, if the engineer can point to a lower cloud bill.. I'm not saying it's always a well considered balance, just that burning money temporarily is a valid strategy.
    - delfinom 6y ago
      >If you can throw money at the problem and invest engineering resources to do cost optimization later, this is often a valid strategy. If only AWS had thousands of engineers to create a UX that makes cost info all upfront and easy to budget. Clearly it's beyond their capability /s >I'm not saying it's always a well considered balance, just that burning money temporarily is a valid strategy. Yes, but I bet a majority of AWS users don't want that to be the default strategy.
ksec 6y ago
>Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. And to make another point. Apple isn't a lower-end cost cutting laptop makers. Apple sell ~20M Mac per year. Intel ship roughly ~220M PC CPU per year ( I think recent years saw the number trending back towards 250M) That is close to 10%. Not an insignificant number. Apple only use expensive Intel CPU. Lots of survey shows most $1000+ PC belongs to Apple. Most of the business Desktop, and Laptop uses comparatively cheap Intel CPU. i.e I would not be surprised the median price of Apple's Intel CPU purchase is at least 2x to total market median if not more. In terms of revenue that is 20% of Intel's consumer segment. They used to charge a premium for being the leading edge Fab. You cant get silicon that is better than Intel. You are basically paying those premiums for having the best. Then Intel's Fab went from 2 years leading, to now 2 years behind, ( That is 4 years difference. ) all while charging the same price. And since Intel wants to keep its margin, it is not much of a surprise customers, ( Apple and Amazon ) looks for alternative. Here is another piece on Amazon Graviton 2. https://threader.app/thread/1274020102573158402 https://threader.app/thread/1274020102573158402 May be I should submit it to HN.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Yea, last I looked at it, Apples average Mac sakes price was $1300, HP/Dell/et al were under $500. Apple owns the premium PC market, it’s Mac division is not only the most profitable PC company in the world, it might be more profitable than all the others combined. It’s share of Intels most expensive desktop CPUs is much higher than its raw market share.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
And precisely for this reason if I were Amazon/AWS I would buy ARM from Softbank right now - especially at a time when the Vision Fund is performing so poorly, and therefore there might be financial distress on the side of Softbank.
- headmelted 6y ago
  I'm not so sure about so many parts of this. I love working on ARM, but with the licensing model I'm not sure how much of a positive return Amazon would really be able to squeeze from their investment. It also potentially brings them a truckload of future headaches if any of their cloud competitors raise anti-trust concerns down the road. Beyond that, I think Apple, ARM and AMD get a lot of credit for their recent designs - a lot of which is due, but quite a bit of which should really go to TSMC. The TSMC 7nm fabrication node is what's really driven microprocessors forward in the last few years, and hardly anyone outside of our industry has ever heard of them. I don't know that Amazon couldn't transition to RISC-V if they needed to in a couple of years.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I think it's still a sound investment, not for the ROI, but for a stake in controlling the future. They could mitigate the anti-trust angle a bit by getting Apple, IBM, and maybe Google onboard. Microsoft controls a lot of lucrative business-centric markets. An advantage that seems to have helped MS Azure surpass AWS in marketshare. One of Microsoft's weaknesses is their in-ability to migrate away from x86 in any meaningful way. IBM could used Redhat to push the corporate server market away from x86 under the guise of lower operating costs, which could deal a tremendous blow to MS, leaving Amazon and Google with an opening to hit the Office and Azure market.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  Imagine if Oracle buys it, and it becomes another SUN-type outcome?
staycoolboy 6y ago
Try Ampere: https://amperecomputing.com/ https://amperecomputing.com/ Ever since Cavium gave up Arm server products and pivoted to HPC, there hasn't been a real Arm compititor. Ampere is almost all ex-Intel.
kllrnohj 6y ago
Epyc Rome is now available on EC2 and the c5a.xlarge16 plan appears to be about the same or slightly cheaper than the Graviton 2 plan. Being cheaper isn't enough here - Graviton needs to be faster and it needs to do that over generations. It needs to _sustain_ its position to become attractive. Intel can fix price in a heartbeat - they've done that in the past when they were behind. Intel's current fab issues does make this a great time to strike, but what about in 2 years? 3 years? 4? Intel's been behind before, but they don't stay there. Switching to Epyc Rome at the moment is an easy migration - same ISA, same memory model, vendor that isn't new to the game, etc... But Graviton needs a bigger jump, there's more investment there to port things over to ARM. Will that investment pay off over time is a much harder question to answer.
- acdha 6y ago
  > But Graviton needs a bigger jump, there's more investment there to port things over to ARM. I agree to some extent but don’t underestimate how much this has changed in the cloud era: it’s never been cheaper to run multiple ISAs and a whole lot of stuff is running in environments where switching is easy (API-managed deployments, microservices, etc.) and the toolchains support ARM already thanks to phones/tablets and previous servers - so much code will just run on the JVM, high level languages like JavaScript Python, or low-level ones like Go and Rust with great cross-compiler support, etc. and hardware acceleration also takes away the need to pour engineer-hours into things like OpenSSL which might have blocked tons of applications. At many businesses that is probably over the threshold where someone can say it’s worth switching the easy n% over since they’ll save money now and if the price/performance crown shifts back so can their workloads. AWS has apparently already done this for managed services like load-balancers and I’m sure they aren’t alone in watching the prices very closely. That’s what Intel is most afraid of: the fat margins aren’t coming back even if they ship a great next generation chip.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    The problem here is that ARM & x86 have very different memory models, not that the ISA itself is a big issue. Re-compiling for ARM is super easy, yes absolutely. Making sure you don't have any latent thread-safety bugs that happened to be OK because it was on x86 that are now bugs on ARM? That's a lot harder, and it only takes a couple of those to potentially wipe out any savings that were potentially had, as they are in the class of bugs that's particularly hard to track down.
Androider 6y ago
We recently evaluated using Graviton2 over X86 for our Node.js app on AWS. There was enough friction, some native packages that didn't work out of the box, etc. and some key third party dependencies missing completely, that it wasn't worth the effort in the end even considering the savings, as we'd likely keep having these issues pop up and having to debug them remotely on Graviton. If macOS goes ARM and there's a sizable population of developers testing and fixing these issues constantly, the math changes in favor of Graviton and it would make it a no-brainer to pick the cheaper alternative once everything "just works".
- vardump 6y ago
  Filing bugs against the broken packages would be a nice thing to do. Easy enough to test on a Raspberry Pi or whatever. I have a hunch our industry will need to increasingly deal with ARM environments.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Unfortunately you might have witnessed the achilles heel of ARM ecosystem, where certain SW/binaries are not available yet. Most open-source code can be compiled for ARM without much hassle[1][2][3], but some might require explicit changes to port certain x86 specific instructions to ARM. I've been shifting my work to ARM based machine for some years now, mainly to reduce power consumption. One of my current projects - A problem validation platform[4](Go) has been running nicely on a ARM server(Cavium ThunderX SoCs) on scaleway; but weirdly scaleway decided to quit on ARM servers[5] sighting hardware issues which not many of the ARM users seem to have faced. Only ARM specific issue I faced with scaleway was that the reboot required power-off. [1]cudf: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5d81abc https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5... [2]Ray: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b4b8cc4 https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b... [3]Apache Arrow: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603c8d521 https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603... [4]needgap: https://needgap.com https://needgap.com [5]Scaleway ditched ARM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925
sudosysgen 6y ago
Graviton is only cheaper because Amazon gouges you slightly less. Graviton is still almost an order of magnitude slower than a VPS of the same cost, which is around what the hardware and infra costs Amazon.
brian_herman__ 6y ago
And since you can already run windows 10 on arm https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ I is only a matter of time before we get Windows Server on arm. Though I guess you can run SQL Server on Linux on ARM already I think, though I am not entirely sure about that.

fluffything 6y ago

> Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. If you develop for Mac, chances are you want your CI to use the same target hardware, which means cloud ARM hardware to run Mac VMs.

saagarjha 6y ago
Except you’re not going to be selling access to a Mac VM running on Graviton anytime soon.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Chances indeed, but given how a lot of software is written in crossplatform languages (Java, JS, Ruby, etc) or the underlying CPU hardware is abstracted away (most compiled languages), I like to think it doesn't really matter except in edge cases and / or libraries. Wishful thinking though, probably.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I can abstract away the OS (mostly), but I can’t abstract away the ISA without paying a pretty hefty performance cost.

underdeserver 6y ago

Exactly. Yes, some people need memory and multi-core speeds, but for most, it's the cost per "good enough" instance, and that's CapEx and power, both of which could be much lower with ARM.

dannyw 6y ago
If you need multi-core speeds, you'd be silly to not go AMD Epyc (~50% cheaper), or ARM. People paid the IBM tax for decades. Intel is the new IBM. Wherever you look, Intel's lineup is not competitive and it is only surviving due to inertia.
- bgorman 6y ago
  It isn't quite that simple, Intel has way more engineering resources than AMD and for some complicated setups like data centers, Intel really does have good arguments that their systems are better tested than the competition, and Intel does have better ability to bundle products together than AMD.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    > their systems are better tested than the competition Yes, Spectrum and Meltdown definitely proves that... I think I heard that argument already, in the 90's. But instead of Intel it was Sun, it was SGI, it was Digital, etc The truth is that money wins and while there is an inertia, it's more like a Cartoon inertia where your guy won't fall from the cliff until he looks down. But then it's too late.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Intel is behind in fab technology. I don't think the problem is that Intel's chip designs are what's holding them back. AMD offered better multi core performance and Intel responded with more cores as well. However, I do believe that Intel suffers from an awful corporate environment. There was a story about ISPC [0] with one chapter [1] talking about the culture at the company. [0] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html [1] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/28/ispc-talks-and-departure.html https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/28/ispc-talks-and-depart...

lostmsu 6y ago

Pedantic: actually, cloud ARM VMs and ARM laptops mean eventual Mac ARM laptops. The former two are already widespread in Graviton2 you mentioned and Surface X and also 3rd party ones.

dis-sys 6y ago
there is no mainstream ARM laptop as of writing. what are my options if I want a ARM laptop with say good mobile processor performance close to the i7-8850H found in a 2018 mbp 15, 16GB RAM and 512GB NVME SSD to setup my day to day dev environment (Linux + Golang + C++ etc)? surface x is the only ARM laptop you can easily purchase, but it is windows only and the processor is way too slow. there is also close to 0 response from app vendors to bring their apps to native ARM windows environment.
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  How is the X slow? The reviewers have only claimed it was slow when emulating x86, but not in native apps.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    Not sure how slow it’s ARM processor is in actual use, but we know it’s far slower than Apple ARM CPUs.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  AFAIK, you can game on Surface X without much issue. There are numerous YouTube videos of popular games doing 60 FPS on descent settings. Apple fans just seem to be in denial about being late to the game. I have to admit, the Apple's ARM processors will likely be significantly faster per core. But they are not the driver of the switch to ARM. If anything, Chromebooks were.

mtgx 6y ago

> Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. Also this sounds like a classic innovator's dilemma for Intel to make. "Forget about all of this low-margin/lower-end stuff. Let's just focus on the higher-end/higher-profitable products. What could possibly go wrong?"

bubblethink 6y ago

>Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. What is the connection here ? ARM servers would be fine in a separate discussion. What does it have to do with Macs ? Macs aren't harbingers of anything. They have set literally no trend in the last couple of decades, other than thinness at all costs. If you mean that developers will use Gravitons to develop mac apps, why/how would that be ?

Torkel 6y ago
To quote Linus Torvalds: "Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bull*t. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)." So I would argue there is a strong connection.
- bubblethink 6y ago
  But that's the other way round. If you have an x86 PC, you can develop x86 cloud software easily. You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway (i.e., that's not apple's focus). You develop mac software on macs for other macs. If you have to develop cloud software, you'll do so on linux (or wsl or whatever). What is the grand plan here ? You'll run an arm linux vm on your mac to develop general cloud software which will be deployed on graviton ?
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway I've got anecdata that says different. My backend/cloud team has been pretty evenly split between Mac and Windows (with only one Linux on the desktop user). This is at a Java shop (with legacy Grails codebases to maintain but not do any new development on).
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    > If you have to develop cloud software, you'll do so on linux (or wsl or whatever). I think you are vastly underestimating how many people use Mac (or use Windows without using WSL) to develop for the cloud.

sergeykish 6y ago

Everyone mentions Intel high margins on servers and somehow does not consider if Apple wants these margins too. > Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? > It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.

wbl 6y ago
Apple backed away from the server market years ago despite having a quite nice web solution.
mshook 6y ago
It was also because Intel was like this giant steamroller you couldn't compete with because it was also selling desktop CPUs. Sure they have lower margins on desktop but these brings sh!t tons of cash, cash you will then use for research and to develop your next desktop and server CPUs. If I believe this page [1], consumer CPUs brought almost $10 billions in 2019... In comparison, server CPUs generated $7 billions of revenues... And these days, Intel has like >90% of that market. Other players (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, ...) were playing in a walled garden and couldn't really compete on any of that (except pricing because their stuff was crazy expensive). So not only they were sharing the server market with Intel but Intel was most likely earning more than the sum of it all from their desktop CPUs... More money, more research, more progress shared between the consumer and server CPUs: rinse and repeat and eventually you will catch up. And also, they could sell their server CPUs for a lot less than their "boutique" competitors. You just can't compete with a player which has almost unlimited funds and executes well... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019....

reitzensteinm 6y ago

While Graviton is impressive and probably an indication of things to come, you can't outright use "Amazon rents them cheaper to me" as an indication of the price performance of the chips themselves. Amazon is exactly the kind of company that would take 50% margin on their x86 servers and 0% margin on their Graviton servers in order to engineer a long term shift that's in their favor - the end of x86 server duopoly (or monopoly depending on how the wind is blowing).

delfinom 6y ago
Long term, Amazon is also the exact kind of company that would start making "modifications" to Graviton requiring you to purchase/use/license a special compiler to run ;)
- whoisthisfor 6y ago
  Can you point to a time Amazon did something like that? Not saying they won't, just any company can do it, it's more likely when they've done it in the past.
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013a 6y ago
I don't feel as sure about this; there's very little evidence that Amazon is putting a "50% margin", or any significant percent, on x86 servers. Sure, they're more expensive than, just for comparisons' sake, Linode or DigitalOcean, but EC2 instances are also roughly the same cost per-core and per-gb as Azure compute instances, which is a far more accurate comparison. Many people complain about AWS' networking costs, but I also suspect these are generally at-cost. A typical AWS region has terabits upon terabits of nano-second scale latency fiber ran between its AZs and out to the wider internet. Networking is an exponential problem; AWS doesn't overcharge for egress, they just simply haven't invested in building a solution that sacrifices quality for cost. Amazon really does not have a history of throwing huge margins on raw compute resources. What Amazon does is build valuable software and services around those raw resources, then put huge margins on those products. EC2 and S3 are likely very close to 0% margin; but DynamoDB, EFS, Lambda, etc are much higher margin. I've found AWS Transfer for SFTP [1] to be the most egregious and actually exploitative example of this; it effectively puts an SFTP gateway in front of an S3 bucket, and they'll charge you $216/month + egress AND ingress at ~150% the standard egress rate for that benefit (SFTP layers additional egress charges on-top-of the standard AWS transfer rates). [1] https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I would suspect that Apple is likely to enforce exclusive hardware for ARM; just like it does now, for Intel (which is a lot more common than ARM). The limitation is not technical (as hackintoshes demonstrate); it’s legal. That said, it would be great to be able to run Mac software (and iOS) on server-based VMs. I just don’t think it will happen at scale, because lawyers.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

> you’d be stupid there's still a load of non scale-out services that the world depends upon.

panpanna 6y ago

> Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs. Why do you think that? Cloud means linux, apple does not even have a server OS anymore. We are seeing some ARM devices entering the server space, but these have been in progress for ears and have absolutely nothing to do with apples (supposed) CPU switch.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Why do you think developers don't run Linux VMs on macOS laptops?
- imglorp 6y ago
  They absolutely do. One reason is to get the same environment they get in a cloud deployment scaled down. Another is Apple keeps messing with compatibility, most recent example being the code signing thing slowing down script executions. Edit, this includes docker on Mac: it's not native.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  When they run Docker that's precisely what they do...

anonymousDan 6y ago

Does anyone know if AWS Graviton supports TrustZone?

imtringued 6y ago

>you’d be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 You overestimate the AWS customer base. Lots of them do silly things that cost them a lot of money.

speedgoose 6y ago
It's because AWS is designed in a such a way that it's very easy to spend a lot, and very difficult to know why.
- jopsen 6y ago
  If you can throw money at the problem and invest engineering resources to do cost optimization later, this is often a valid strategy. It's often easy to test if scaling the instance size/count resolves a performance issue. If it does, you know you can fix the problem by burning money. When you have reasonable certainty of the outcome spending money is easier than engineering resources. And later it's easier for an engineer to justify performance optimizations, if the engineer can point to a lower cloud bill.. I'm not saying it's always a well considered balance, just that burning money temporarily is a valid strategy.
  - delfinom 6y ago
    >If you can throw money at the problem and invest engineering resources to do cost optimization later, this is often a valid strategy. If only AWS had thousands of engineers to create a UX that makes cost info all upfront and easy to budget. Clearly it's beyond their capability /s >I'm not saying it's always a well considered balance, just that burning money temporarily is a valid strategy. Yes, but I bet a majority of AWS users don't want that to be the default strategy.

ksec 6y ago

>Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators, not in supplying lower-end chips to cost-cutting laptop makers. And to make another point. Apple isn't a lower-end cost cutting laptop makers. Apple sell ~20M Mac per year. Intel ship roughly ~220M PC CPU per year ( I think recent years saw the number trending back towards 250M) That is close to 10%. Not an insignificant number. Apple only use expensive Intel CPU. Lots of survey shows most $1000+ PC belongs to Apple. Most of the business Desktop, and Laptop uses comparatively cheap Intel CPU. i.e I would not be surprised the median price of Apple's Intel CPU purchase is at least 2x to total market median if not more. In terms of revenue that is 20% of Intel's consumer segment. They used to charge a premium for being the leading edge Fab. You cant get silicon that is better than Intel. You are basically paying those premiums for having the best. Then Intel's Fab went from 2 years leading, to now 2 years behind, ( That is 4 years difference. ) all while charging the same price. And since Intel wants to keep its margin, it is not much of a surprise customers, ( Apple and Amazon ) looks for alternative. Here is another piece on Amazon Graviton 2. https://threader.app/thread/1274020102573158402 https://threader.app/thread/1274020102573158402 May be I should submit it to HN.

valuearb 6y ago
Yea, last I looked at it, Apples average Mac sakes price was $1300, HP/Dell/et al were under $500. Apple owns the premium PC market, it’s Mac division is not only the most profitable PC company in the world, it might be more profitable than all the others combined. It’s share of Intels most expensive desktop CPUs is much higher than its raw market share.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

And precisely for this reason if I were Amazon/AWS I would buy ARM from Softbank right now - especially at a time when the Vision Fund is performing so poorly, and therefore there might be financial distress on the side of Softbank.

headmelted 6y ago
I'm not so sure about so many parts of this. I love working on ARM, but with the licensing model I'm not sure how much of a positive return Amazon would really be able to squeeze from their investment. It also potentially brings them a truckload of future headaches if any of their cloud competitors raise anti-trust concerns down the road. Beyond that, I think Apple, ARM and AMD get a lot of credit for their recent designs - a lot of which is due, but quite a bit of which should really go to TSMC. The TSMC 7nm fabrication node is what's really driven microprocessors forward in the last few years, and hardly anyone outside of our industry has ever heard of them. I don't know that Amazon couldn't transition to RISC-V if they needed to in a couple of years.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I think it's still a sound investment, not for the ROI, but for a stake in controlling the future. They could mitigate the anti-trust angle a bit by getting Apple, IBM, and maybe Google onboard. Microsoft controls a lot of lucrative business-centric markets. An advantage that seems to have helped MS Azure surpass AWS in marketshare. One of Microsoft's weaknesses is their in-ability to migrate away from x86 in any meaningful way. IBM could used Redhat to push the corporate server market away from x86 under the guise of lower operating costs, which could deal a tremendous blow to MS, leaving Amazon and Google with an opening to hit the Office and Azure market.
TuringNYC 6y ago
Imagine if Oracle buys it, and it becomes another SUN-type outcome?

staycoolboy 6y ago

Try Ampere: https://amperecomputing.com/ https://amperecomputing.com/ Ever since Cavium gave up Arm server products and pivoted to HPC, there hasn't been a real Arm compititor. Ampere is almost all ex-Intel.

kllrnohj 6y ago

Epyc Rome is now available on EC2 and the c5a.xlarge16 plan appears to be about the same or slightly cheaper than the Graviton 2 plan. Being cheaper isn't enough here - Graviton needs to be faster and it needs to do that over generations. It needs to _sustain_ its position to become attractive. Intel can fix price in a heartbeat - they've done that in the past when they were behind. Intel's current fab issues does make this a great time to strike, but what about in 2 years? 3 years? 4? Intel's been behind before, but they don't stay there. Switching to Epyc Rome at the moment is an easy migration - same ISA, same memory model, vendor that isn't new to the game, etc... But Graviton needs a bigger jump, there's more investment there to port things over to ARM. Will that investment pay off over time is a much harder question to answer.

acdha 6y ago
> But Graviton needs a bigger jump, there's more investment there to port things over to ARM. I agree to some extent but don’t underestimate how much this has changed in the cloud era: it’s never been cheaper to run multiple ISAs and a whole lot of stuff is running in environments where switching is easy (API-managed deployments, microservices, etc.) and the toolchains support ARM already thanks to phones/tablets and previous servers - so much code will just run on the JVM, high level languages like JavaScript Python, or low-level ones like Go and Rust with great cross-compiler support, etc. and hardware acceleration also takes away the need to pour engineer-hours into things like OpenSSL which might have blocked tons of applications. At many businesses that is probably over the threshold where someone can say it’s worth switching the easy n% over since they’ll save money now and if the price/performance crown shifts back so can their workloads. AWS has apparently already done this for managed services like load-balancers and I’m sure they aren’t alone in watching the prices very closely. That’s what Intel is most afraid of: the fat margins aren’t coming back even if they ship a great next generation chip.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  The problem here is that ARM & x86 have very different memory models, not that the ISA itself is a big issue. Re-compiling for ARM is super easy, yes absolutely. Making sure you don't have any latent thread-safety bugs that happened to be OK because it was on x86 that are now bugs on ARM? That's a lot harder, and it only takes a couple of those to potentially wipe out any savings that were potentially had, as they are in the class of bugs that's particularly hard to track down.

Androider 6y ago

We recently evaluated using Graviton2 over X86 for our Node.js app on AWS. There was enough friction, some native packages that didn't work out of the box, etc. and some key third party dependencies missing completely, that it wasn't worth the effort in the end even considering the savings, as we'd likely keep having these issues pop up and having to debug them remotely on Graviton. If macOS goes ARM and there's a sizable population of developers testing and fixing these issues constantly, the math changes in favor of Graviton and it would make it a no-brainer to pick the cheaper alternative once everything "just works".

vardump 6y ago
Filing bugs against the broken packages would be a nice thing to do. Easy enough to test on a Raspberry Pi or whatever. I have a hunch our industry will need to increasingly deal with ARM environments.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Unfortunately you might have witnessed the achilles heel of ARM ecosystem, where certain SW/binaries are not available yet. Most open-source code can be compiled for ARM without much hassle[1][2][3], but some might require explicit changes to port certain x86 specific instructions to ARM. I've been shifting my work to ARM based machine for some years now, mainly to reduce power consumption. One of my current projects - A problem validation platform[4](Go) has been running nicely on a ARM server(Cavium ThunderX SoCs) on scaleway; but weirdly scaleway decided to quit on ARM servers[5] sighting hardware issues which not many of the ARM users seem to have faced. Only ARM specific issue I faced with scaleway was that the reboot required power-off. [1]cudf: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5d81abc https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5... [2]Ray: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b4b8cc4 https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b... [3]Apache Arrow: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603c8d521 https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603... [4]needgap: https://needgap.com https://needgap.com [5]Scaleway ditched ARM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925

sudosysgen 6y ago

Graviton is only cheaper because Amazon gouges you slightly less. Graviton is still almost an order of magnitude slower than a VPS of the same cost, which is around what the hardware and infra costs Amazon.

brian_herman__ 6y ago

And since you can already run windows 10 on arm https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ I is only a matter of time before we get Windows Server on arm. Though I guess you can run SQL Server on Linux on ARM already I think, though I am not entirely sure about that.