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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.

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.

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.