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As I see it, Intel and AMD see the super computer market as "niche" and while it gives good publicity, there are perhaps 1 or 2 such machines sold each year. As

As I see it, Intel and AMD see the super computer market as "niche" and while it gives good publicity, there are perhaps 1 or 2 such machines sold each year. As a result they spend their time and "innovation beans" on things that make desktop and laptop computers more desirable. IBM's Power architecture is another computer ecosystem that is really innovative and cool but you hardly hear about it. Different target markets. The second part of the issue is "head start." For literally decades the "cost" of a computer architecture was perhaps 3% chips and 97% software support for those chips. The "Windows" lock (by having the #1 OS run only on x86 architecture machines) meant that Intel really didn't have to do anything for years but shrink their transistor size and they could "win." Linux took away the Windows "moat", networking took away the "enterprise server" moat, and gcc took away the "compiler/tools" moat. Between the three of them it gave everyone a chance to play if they wanted to stake out a niche. ARM took "low power" and captured phones for which battery power is key. By licensing the architecture widely and inexpensively they enabled parallel investment that well exceeded anything a single manufacturer could apply to a particular architecture. By some estimates you have over $50 billion dollars / year being spent on R&D that accelerates ARM compared to Intel's $15 billion R&D budget for 2020? Not so much "blowing their head start" as is it getting mowed down by not being able to invest as much as the other guys.

bhouston 6y ago
It used to be a big deal when intel machines started to show up and then rule the supercomputer benchmarks. It used to be all specialized chips like IBM Power. It was when Intel was ascendant. Now ARM is doing the same thing. Arm is attacking Intel at the top and bottom and middle leaving less and less space for them to operate. Intel lost embedded to arm first. Then the lost mobile. Then they lost the Apple laptops and later this year the Apple desktops. They are starting to lose the super computers. The nail in the coffin will come with the cloud servers if those vendors could get something close to Apple’s custom Arm cpu performance.
- ori_b 6y ago
  This worries me. Intel was never very clean, but it's so much more open than every other option. There's even complete GPU documentation.
- whatever1 6y ago
  The only market left unchallenged for Intel/AMD is the consumer dektop / gaming. If Samsung / Qualcomm/ Mediatek make a new motherboard design and introduce a new ARM cpu with double the single core performance (M1 showed that this is not science fiction), then the x86 folks are in deep trouble.
  - bhouston 6y ago
    Cloud isn’t really challenged yet and is the most lucrative market for Intel, just minor inroads from fairly slow arm chips. The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there. I wonder how long that will take to change? Honestly it would be brilliant for Apple to start offering Mx cpus in the cloud at affordable rates to the various cloud providers.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      I think Intel/AMD's cloud presence is definitely getting challenged by ARM and it's momentum is just increasing. A lot of cloud workloads are not CPU bound. More often they're IO bound. Amazon's Graviton2 and Ampere's Altra are tackling that IO bound space. They have dozens of single thread cores, lots of memory channels, and lots of PCI Express lanes (64 and 128 respectively IIRC). They're not slouches in CPU power but their IO is really impressive. Having high power and high bandwidth chips at a fraction of the power of Xeons is a win for cloud providers. They can either get higher density in the same power/cooling envelope or reduce their power/cooling requirements for the same capacity. At cloud provider scale power is a major cost driver.
    - ksec 6y ago
      >Cloud isn’t really challenged yet.... AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers. HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business. HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market. HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon. AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing x86 services to those who needs it ) Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server. >The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there. Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86 instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU = Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30% cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by large margin. If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time, that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market. Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. The lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very hard, had no experience in market and product business. Luckily that is about to change. Evaluating ARM switch takes time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly, getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Absolutely. That ARM has been gnawing on the dominance of the x86 architecture (and by proxy Intel) first became obvious to me when Intel tried desperately to make an x86 chip that was competitive in the Android ODM space. I still have a Lenovo Android tablet with an Intel processor in it[1]. Intel's business model of being 30% of the BOM cost for the base board just doesn't fly in the phone/tablet world. If I were still at NetApp I would be all over a filer design based on 64 bit multi-core ARM architecture with a bespoke I/O architecture to support 1000+ drives per filer. The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). [1] It sucks BTW, Android gave up trying to fix all of the byte ordering problems and so many of the apps fail to execute correctly.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    > Android gave up trying to fix all of the byte ordering problems and so many of the apps fail to execute correctly What byte ordering problems could affect x86?? The only big endian platform Android was ported to was MIPS. Maybe what you're seeing is apps with native components that are only compiled for armv6/7.
  - gnufx 6y ago
    > The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). Top500 is based on the HPL benchmark. Its problems are specifically not being sensitive to memory and networking (specifically network latency). That's why half(?) of it is things like "cloud vendor", where you're not going to run typical HPC codes past three nodes.
gnufx 6y ago
There may be only a couple of CORAL-size systems (Summit et al) a year but there are many >~$1M HPC systems sold. Intel have so far failed to deliver for CORAL.

bhouston 6y ago

It used to be a big deal when intel machines started to show up and then rule the supercomputer benchmarks. It used to be all specialized chips like IBM Power. It was when Intel was ascendant. Now ARM is doing the same thing. Arm is attacking Intel at the top and bottom and middle leaving less and less space for them to operate. Intel lost embedded to arm first. Then the lost mobile. Then they lost the Apple laptops and later this year the Apple desktops. They are starting to lose the super computers. The nail in the coffin will come with the cloud servers if those vendors could get something close to Apple’s custom Arm cpu performance.

ori_b 6y ago
This worries me. Intel was never very clean, but it's so much more open than every other option. There's even complete GPU documentation.
whatever1 6y ago
The only market left unchallenged for Intel/AMD is the consumer dektop / gaming. If Samsung / Qualcomm/ Mediatek make a new motherboard design and introduce a new ARM cpu with double the single core performance (M1 showed that this is not science fiction), then the x86 folks are in deep trouble.
- bhouston 6y ago
  Cloud isn’t really challenged yet and is the most lucrative market for Intel, just minor inroads from fairly slow arm chips. The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there. I wonder how long that will take to change? Honestly it would be brilliant for Apple to start offering Mx cpus in the cloud at affordable rates to the various cloud providers.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    I think Intel/AMD's cloud presence is definitely getting challenged by ARM and it's momentum is just increasing. A lot of cloud workloads are not CPU bound. More often they're IO bound. Amazon's Graviton2 and Ampere's Altra are tackling that IO bound space. They have dozens of single thread cores, lots of memory channels, and lots of PCI Express lanes (64 and 128 respectively IIRC). They're not slouches in CPU power but their IO is really impressive. Having high power and high bandwidth chips at a fraction of the power of Xeons is a win for cloud providers. They can either get higher density in the same power/cooling envelope or reduce their power/cooling requirements for the same capacity. At cloud provider scale power is a major cost driver.
  - ksec 6y ago
    >Cloud isn’t really challenged yet.... AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers. HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business. HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market. HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon. AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing x86 services to those who needs it ) Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server. >The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there. Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86 instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU = Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30% cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by large margin. If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time, that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market. Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. The lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very hard, had no experience in market and product business. Luckily that is about to change. Evaluating ARM switch takes time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly, getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Absolutely. That ARM has been gnawing on the dominance of the x86 architecture (and by proxy Intel) first became obvious to me when Intel tried desperately to make an x86 chip that was competitive in the Android ODM space. I still have a Lenovo Android tablet with an Intel processor in it[1]. Intel's business model of being 30% of the BOM cost for the base board just doesn't fly in the phone/tablet world. If I were still at NetApp I would be all over a filer design based on 64 bit multi-core ARM architecture with a bespoke I/O architecture to support 1000+ drives per filer. The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). [1] It sucks BTW, Android gave up trying to fix all of the byte ordering problems and so many of the apps fail to execute correctly.
- floatboth 6y ago
  > Android gave up trying to fix all of the byte ordering problems and so many of the apps fail to execute correctly What byte ordering problems could affect x86?? The only big endian platform Android was ported to was MIPS. Maybe what you're seeing is apps with native components that are only compiled for armv6/7.
- gnufx 6y ago
  > The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). Top500 is based on the HPL benchmark. Its problems are specifically not being sensitive to memory and networking (specifically network latency). That's why half(?) of it is things like "cloud vendor", where you're not going to run typical HPC codes past three nodes.

gnufx 6y ago

There may be only a couple of CORAL-size systems (Summit et al) a year but there are many >~$1M HPC systems sold. Intel have so far failed to deliver for CORAL.