8 ms·

Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most

Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing. Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any) ARM instances--fast.

sneak 6y ago
It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
  - sneak 6y ago
    My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines. There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks? After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/ Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Future ARM Surface laptops will probably be faster than Graviton per-core but obviously with fewer cores.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still. Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86. AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly. Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by TSMC, they are seeing their entire ISA getting challenged. Wow are they in trouble.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?
    - dagmx 6y ago
      It is, but nvidia don't need it necessarily to compete in the ARM space, since they already make Arm SOCs
      - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
        arguably they would proceed on an ARM design with or without the formal company acquisition. It's too good of an opportunity.
    - uKGgZfqqNZtf7Za 6y ago
      It has to go through regulatory approval in the UK but this was to be expected. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) said he expected the acquisition to be complete by 2023.
- wmf 6y ago
  Ampere Altra is actually faster than Graviton 2 and you can buy it. (But apparently the motherboard is >$5,000!?!) https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html
matwood 6y ago
Agreed. I'm busy transitioning everything I can to Graviton2 for the $/perf savings. For my Java services so far, no change. Aurora was a button click. ECS is the next thing to tackle.
- sprite 6y ago
  I hope they add support for graviton on elastic beanstalk soon.
fomine3 6y ago
It's great EC2 instance for perf/cost, but how is it outperformed other x86 instances? Benchmark between Gravition2/EPYC(Zen1)/Xeon(Cascade Lake) shows that all CPUs are similar level. And now C5a EPYC(Zen3) is available, Xeon(Ice Lake) is sold. For M1, it obviously outperformed competitive. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
Corrado 6y ago
As the primary AWS guy in our company I'm pushing for all our developers to get M1 macs ASAP. When that happens we'll start building/testing on ARM systems and I'll transition all of our EC2 stuff over to Graviton processors. I've already moved several systems over to t4g instance types and we are saving $100's per month. Bonus! This makes performance review time super easy; you've saved the company thousands of dollars this year, how about a raise?!

sneak 6y ago

It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
- sneak 6y ago
  My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines. There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks? After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/ Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.
- wmf 6y ago
  Future ARM Surface laptops will probably be faster than Graviton per-core but obviously with fewer cores.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still. Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86. AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly. Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by TSMC, they are seeing their entire ISA getting challenged. Wow are they in trouble.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?
  - dagmx 6y ago
    It is, but nvidia don't need it necessarily to compete in the ARM space, since they already make Arm SOCs
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      arguably they would proceed on an ARM design with or without the formal company acquisition. It's too good of an opportunity.
  - uKGgZfqqNZtf7Za 6y ago
    It has to go through regulatory approval in the UK but this was to be expected. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) said he expected the acquisition to be complete by 2023.
wmf 6y ago
Ampere Altra is actually faster than Graviton 2 and you can buy it. (But apparently the motherboard is >$5,000!?!) https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html

matwood 6y ago

Agreed. I'm busy transitioning everything I can to Graviton2 for the $/perf savings. For my Java services so far, no change. Aurora was a button click. ECS is the next thing to tackle.

sprite 6y ago
I hope they add support for graviton on elastic beanstalk soon.

fomine3 6y ago

It's great EC2 instance for perf/cost, but how is it outperformed other x86 instances? Benchmark between Gravition2/EPYC(Zen1)/Xeon(Cascade Lake) shows that all CPUs are similar level. And now C5a EPYC(Zen3) is available, Xeon(Ice Lake) is sold. For M1, it obviously outperformed competitive. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

Corrado 6y ago

As the primary AWS guy in our company I'm pushing for all our developers to get M1 macs ASAP. When that happens we'll start building/testing on ARM systems and I'll transition all of our EC2 stuff over to Graviton processors. I've already moved several systems over to t4g instance types and we are saving $100's per month. Bonus! This makes performance review time super easy; you've saved the company thousands of dollars this year, how about a raise?!