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So Intel... Lost their lead in consumer desktop CPUs and said ‘oh we have mobile and server’ But now AMD prove that Intel’s lead in mobile has been squandered

by jarym 6y ago

So Intel... Lost their lead in consumer desktop CPUs and said ‘oh we have mobile and server’ But now AMD prove that Intel’s lead in mobile has been squandered. And then the largest buyers of server grade stuff are cloud vendors who are waiting for ARM to come of age.

lazylizard 6y ago
epyc rome are cheap n good
Dig1t 6y ago
I don't really think cloud vendors are holding their breath to switch to ARM, they are all heavily invested in X86. All their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same.
- jarym 6y ago
  Desktop and laptop vendors were heavily invested with Intel before now. Apple was heavily invested with Intel before now. Don’t underestimate what cloud vendors will do in pursuit of cost or efficiency - they are ruthless at both.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  > their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines Is that really so? Are remote development and emulation not sufficiently advanced yet? Super hot paths might be x86 optimized, but how much does that really matter? I'd think at the scales of the big providers nothing matters more than performance/power use and performance/price.
  - 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago
    There’s still no real justification for vendors to even offer ARM instances, and instead become more clear to keep x86 instead with the rising of remote development and emulation.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Tons of x86 code is dereferencing unaligned addresses. Those have to be fixed before porting to ARM.
    - my123 6y ago
      This isn't applicable to 64-bit Arm at the user application level, don't worry about it. Prior to that, unaligned memory accesses were perfectly usable on ARMv7 (and even v6) too, this was fixed a while ago.
- greggyb 6y ago
  AWS has multiple generations of its own ARM processor. I can't say anything about it, as I have no experience with it. I know it's at least two generations in and they claim 40% cheaper for similar workloads. What I can say is that this level of investment is large.
  - scns 6y ago
    They look pretty good, check out the benchmarks: 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...
- OriginalPenguin 6y ago
  For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time. But much of the cloud is made up of services like S3, RDS, Redshift, Route 53, etc. ARM can be very competitive for many of these.
  - bengale 6y ago
    Graviton is looking really interesting.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time. I wouldn't bet on it being so lopsided. AWS is betting stringing it's ARM processors, which appear to have a better price/performance ratio.
- saghm 6y ago
  > There's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same. The new Apple machines are coming out next year, right?
jmnicolas 6y ago
Don't forget that Apple has pledged to be full Arm on all it's mobile and desktop in 2 years. I don't think Intel can recover, or at least not before 5 to 10 years from now.
toastal 6y ago
The new upgrade in the Xe integrated graphics chip is still compelling to many users
fomine3 6y ago
Intel's mobile chips (below 25W) are still great for performance and power consumption because that's only product that uses 10nm and Sunny Cove cores and their low-power optimization is matured.
imtringued 6y ago
That's funny. If Nvidia buys ARM then that will never happen.

by jarym 6y ago

lazylizard 6y ago

epyc rome are cheap n good

Dig1t 6y ago

I don't really think cloud vendors are holding their breath to switch to ARM, they are all heavily invested in X86. All their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same.

jarym 6y ago
Desktop and laptop vendors were heavily invested with Intel before now. Apple was heavily invested with Intel before now. Don’t underestimate what cloud vendors will do in pursuit of cost or efficiency - they are ruthless at both.
solarkraft 6y ago
> their code has been built on it for forever, and there's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines Is that really so? Are remote development and emulation not sufficiently advanced yet? Super hot paths might be x86 optimized, but how much does that really matter? I'd think at the scales of the big providers nothing matters more than performance/power use and performance/price.
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago
  There’s still no real justification for vendors to even offer ARM instances, and instead become more clear to keep x86 instead with the rising of remote development and emulation.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Tons of x86 code is dereferencing unaligned addresses. Those have to be fixed before porting to ARM.
  - my123 6y ago
    This isn't applicable to 64-bit Arm at the user application level, don't worry about it. Prior to that, unaligned memory accesses were perfectly usable on ARMv7 (and even v6) too, this was fixed a while ago.
greggyb 6y ago
AWS has multiple generations of its own ARM processor. I can't say anything about it, as I have no experience with it. I know it's at least two generations in and they claim 40% cheaper for similar workloads. What I can say is that this level of investment is large.
- scns 6y ago
  They look pretty good, check out the benchmarks: 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...
OriginalPenguin 6y ago
For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time. But much of the cloud is made up of services like S3, RDS, Redshift, Route 53, etc. ARM can be very competitive for many of these.
- bengale 6y ago
  Graviton is looking really interesting.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > For EC2 instances and the like it will be almost all X86 for a long time. I wouldn't bet on it being so lopsided. AWS is betting stringing it's ARM processors, which appear to have a better price/performance ratio.
saghm 6y ago
> There's a big advantage to having your dev machines running the same architecture as your cloud production machines. I think desktop ARM adoption would have to happen before the server market moves to the same. The new Apple machines are coming out next year, right?

jmnicolas 6y ago

Don't forget that Apple has pledged to be full Arm on all it's mobile and desktop in 2 years. I don't think Intel can recover, or at least not before 5 to 10 years from now.

toastal 6y ago

The new upgrade in the Xe integrated graphics chip is still compelling to many users

fomine3 6y ago

Intel's mobile chips (below 25W) are still great for performance and power consumption because that's only product that uses 10nm and Sunny Cove cores and their low-power optimization is matured.

imtringued 6y ago

That's funny. If Nvidia buys ARM then that will never happen.