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> The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The are big players in Internet business, but

> The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The are big players in Internet business, but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips. Even if they will be all combined, they will not be even a double digit of top tier Xeon buyers. And this is partly the reason why AMD was so keen on playing ball with them. AMD among other things was making a proprietary CPU for Amazon, which the later discarded. It was later rebranded Seattle, and thrown on the open market.

viraptor 6y ago
> but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips. AWS Graviton 2 (Arm) would like a word about that with you. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
- baybal2 6y ago
  I bet they will eventually wrap it up, as they can't keep up with AMD, and Intel RnD, and given the restarting of competition in X86, and thus falling prices. Pretty much the only way they could've done that economically, in relative terms, was at the time of obscenely high prices on high core count xeons.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    My take on this is that the Graviton stuff exists to solve the Catch-22 problem: AWS wants you running ARM stuff, so they need to provide an ARM platform for you to do it on. Current suppliers may not be providing anything cloudy enough from the enterprise management side of things, so AWS might have to roll their own for now. Once the ball is rolling, they can get 3rd party ARM chips or full servers in and stop with their own development on that side if they want to.
    - fanf2 6y ago
      Amazon has been putting their own chips into systems for years, after they bought Annapurna Labs - they have hardware virtualisation support in their network and storage chips, and now their own CPU. This does not seem to be a short-term tactic.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Won't keep up in what way? Graviton2 is already better for some use cases. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/ https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Part of being in the top half of the s curve that is Moore's law is that CPU cores, even high performance ones, become a commodity. Historically, designing high perf cores required a huge capital investment on a short time frame in order to take advantage of each node. As the difference in nodes slows, that gives more breathing room for other companies and even open source to create competitive cores for a given gate count. Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      >Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever. No, but Intel and AMD have a decent reason to work together to create new key feature additions to x86 that can be newly patented. FMA is under patent for 6 more years. AVX2 is 12 more years. AVX512 another 15.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    ARM's got a lot of development effort as a whole, and they're getting very competitive performance-wise. They're also not hindered in having to be compatible with the 8088.
jeffbee 6y ago
You think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google taken together are not a major customer of Intel? That's preposterous. I bet they are #1, #2, and #3 buyers of Xeon CPUs taken individually.
- baybal2 6y ago
  And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually. Only this way such volume discounts were realised. If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM.
  - coder543 6y ago
    > And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually. No, they build their own servers. They definitely aren't racking Dell or HP servers. Even Amazon's x86 based servers are extremely custom. That whole "Nitro" system isn't exactly a USB stick, and AWS is often using customized variants of Intel processors in their servers. Let me repeat that: Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS. > If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM. That's not how bulk buying works... at all. The scale of AWS is so much larger than you seem to think it is.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      > Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS Sort of. It's the same mask for everyone with the per customer special features either fused off, or just requiring a special MSR knock sequence.
      - coder543 6y ago
        That’s an implementation detail — an optimization on Intel’s side of things. It’s the same effect either way, and I can’t just ask Intel to customize their processors for me. AWS operates at a large enough scale that they do exactly that, and AWS already purchases directly from Intel, both of which are my main points. Baybal2 doesn’t seem to be aware of either of these facts based on their comment.

viraptor 6y ago

> but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips. AWS Graviton 2 (Arm) would like a word about that with you. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

baybal2 6y ago
I bet they will eventually wrap it up, as they can't keep up with AMD, and Intel RnD, and given the restarting of competition in X86, and thus falling prices. Pretty much the only way they could've done that economically, in relative terms, was at the time of obscenely high prices on high core count xeons.
- core-questions 6y ago
  My take on this is that the Graviton stuff exists to solve the Catch-22 problem: AWS wants you running ARM stuff, so they need to provide an ARM platform for you to do it on. Current suppliers may not be providing anything cloudy enough from the enterprise management side of things, so AWS might have to roll their own for now. Once the ball is rolling, they can get 3rd party ARM chips or full servers in and stop with their own development on that side if they want to.
  - fanf2 6y ago
    Amazon has been putting their own chips into systems for years, after they bought Annapurna Labs - they have hardware virtualisation support in their network and storage chips, and now their own CPU. This does not seem to be a short-term tactic.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Won't keep up in what way? Graviton2 is already better for some use cases. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/ https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...
- monocasa 6y ago
  Part of being in the top half of the s curve that is Moore's law is that CPU cores, even high performance ones, become a commodity. Historically, designing high perf cores required a huge capital investment on a short time frame in order to take advantage of each node. As the difference in nodes slows, that gives more breathing room for other companies and even open source to create competitive cores for a given gate count. Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    >Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever. No, but Intel and AMD have a decent reason to work together to create new key feature additions to x86 that can be newly patented. FMA is under patent for 6 more years. AVX2 is 12 more years. AVX512 another 15.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  ARM's got a lot of development effort as a whole, and they're getting very competitive performance-wise. They're also not hindered in having to be compatible with the 8088.

jeffbee 6y ago

You think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google taken together are not a major customer of Intel? That's preposterous. I bet they are #1, #2, and #3 buyers of Xeon CPUs taken individually.

baybal2 6y ago
And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually. Only this way such volume discounts were realised. If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM.
- coder543 6y ago
  > And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually. No, they build their own servers. They definitely aren't racking Dell or HP servers. Even Amazon's x86 based servers are extremely custom. That whole "Nitro" system isn't exactly a USB stick, and AWS is often using customized variants of Intel processors in their servers. Let me repeat that: Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS. > If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM. That's not how bulk buying works... at all. The scale of AWS is so much larger than you seem to think it is.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    > Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS Sort of. It's the same mask for everyone with the per customer special features either fused off, or just requiring a special MSR knock sequence.
    - coder543 6y ago
      That’s an implementation detail — an optimization on Intel’s side of things. It’s the same effect either way, and I can’t just ask Intel to customize their processors for me. AWS operates at a large enough scale that they do exactly that, and AWS already purchases directly from Intel, both of which are my main points. Baybal2 doesn’t seem to be aware of either of these facts based on their comment.