15 ms·

Intel is NOT competing against AMD only. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips. Focusing on AMD woul

by lvl100 5y ago

Intel is NOT competing against AMD only. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips. Focusing on AMD would be quite myopic from a strategic pov. This market is only getting more competitive. Either you compete on performance or price.

kumarvvr 5y ago
> we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips Fortunately, only a handful of companies have the resources to do that. Unfortunately for Intel, those handful of companies are the biggest and only customers for large scale server farms.
Maakuth 5y ago
These companies are already not paying anything close to the list price, though.
- the-dude 5y ago
  And still they are developing their own ARMs.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  its not about the price but the ability to create chip that fit what you needs. For example: YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips. The biggest cost of making chip is the foundry and the foundry ecosystem have reduced the cost to where everyone can be a fabless and just outsource to foundry like TSMC and Samsung. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Intel IS competing against AMD mainly in the server space now. Of course at some point ARM and RISC-V servers will become mainstream, but it will take years. Intel is taking action now and it's aimed directly at AMD.
- guiriduro 5y ago
  ARM is already there in the cloud, cf AWS Graviton. With Apple's M1 in the laptop/desktop (mac mini) space, ARM and its superior power/performance ratio is a significant contender for mainstream compute now.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I know a few VPS distributors, and I've heard pretty mixed things about ARM's viability in the server space. Not only is it pretty expensive relative to x86, it's also pretty slow: you won't be getting SIMD instructions like AVX, which are huge in the server space. The only thing ARM has going for it is low IPC, but I really fail to see many applications where you could benefit from that, much less one where it would be worth the price premium over x86. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, ARM will be viable. But by then, we'll all be rocking RISC-V CPUs because someone realized that accelerating for specialized workloads isn't a crock of shit when 90% of your workload is video decoding.
    - Hikikomori 5y ago
      Maybe read a bit about Graviton? AllIntel/AMD instances in AWS has Graviton processors to handle network/disk IO unless its a very old instance type, large amounts of AWS own services run on it as well.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        The rumor is that Graviton instances are being sold at below cost for Amazon to put negotiating pressure on Intel/AMD. And that M1 only looks as good as it does because of Apple's de facto monopoly on TSMC 5nm. That AMD cores are more than competitive at the same node.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Too soon do people forget that there were budget Zen 2 SiPs whooping the M1's ass back in 2019. It was at the expense of a slightly higher power draw, but that's a price I'm entirely willing to pay for a full-fledged x86 chip. I reckon that I'll accept no substitutes until RISC-V hits the mainstream in a more major way.
swalsh 5y ago
After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.
- jes 5y ago
  Same. I’ve been loving my M1 Mac Mini for almost a year. Cool, silent, fast and compact.
- dippersauce 5y ago
  Before M1 my only exposure to ARM has been low-power SBCs and Android devices, and the experience was mediocre in the “just works” department. Poor hardware support, and a lack of proprietary software support. Performance was also lacking. Apple’s tight integration and high-end CPUs have resulted in a vastly better experience, but I want to have more options than just macOS and MacBooks. I think we’re trending in the right direction, but it’s going to be a while before (5 years IMO) before we see anything approaching competitive to the M-series chips from major market players. If Microsoft could fix their frankly horrid x86 compatibility on aarch64 devices thing would speed along nicely I think.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    > If Microsoft could fix their frankly horrid x86 compatibility on aarch64 device I don't think Microsoft is the real problem there, though. NT was developed to be portable and was working on architectures other than x86 in the beginning. So it was interesting when I heard things about "Windows on ARM" half a decade ago--and then the Surface RT. The RT was crap, but it did have real Windows NT working on non-Intel ARM, as was the OS on their Windows Series 10 phones or whatever. So Microsoft is already there on an OS level. It's the big software vendors that have to be corralled to switch somehow (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) Honestly .NET overall was probably at least in part Microsoft trying to get developers on something more CPU-agnostic to reduce dependence on x86.
javchz 5y ago
Yeah, Custom ARM / RISC-V chips or even ASIC/FPGAs could start threatening x86/AMD64 for datacenters and "clouds" sooner than we think.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  ARM maybe. But I'm not convinced that the ARM-alliance (Fujitsu, Apple, Ampere, Neoverse) is quite as unified as you might think. Apple has no apparent goals for cloud/servers, Fujitsu seems entirely focused on the Japanese market, and Ampere Altra isn't reaching critical mass (Amazon prefers a Neoverse rather than joining forces with Ampere / using Altra). As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/investments won't really be as aligned as Xeon and/or EPYC servers. HiFive / RISC-V aren't anywhere close to the server-tier.
  - skohan 5y ago
    What about graviton? Isn't it already competitive with x86 on price/performance?
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      Amazon doesn't offer graviton in the open market. You can only get those chips if you buy AWS. Graviton is a standard N1 neoverse core, which is slightly slower than a Skylake Xeon / Zen2 EPYC. There's hope that N2 will be faster, but even if it is, we don't really have an apples-to-apples comparison available (since Amazon doesn't sell that chip). The most likely source of Neoverse cores is the Ampere Altra, which is expected to have N2 cores shipping eventually. As usual though: since Ampere has lower shipping volume than other companies, the motherboards are very expensive. x86 (both Intel and AMD) have extremely high volumes: so from a TCO perspective, its hard to beat them, especially when you consider motherboard prices into the mix.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > As long as the ARM-community is fragmented Why does this matter? If popular OS distributions consistently target ARM-based CPUs, with a sufficient number of packages (esp. development-support-related) working on them, then who cares about fragmentation? An organization could buy systems with ARM chips and software will basically "just work". Same argument for consumer PCs, although there you have the MS Windows issue I guess.
StillBored 5y ago
Because in the past no one could justify competing with Intel. But the xeon parts with huge profit margins, and companies like apple which only tended to buy the high margin parts in their devices the business people realized that it was cheaper to produce their own. Which is outrageous, if you think about it given the amount of engineering investment required to build a competitive product. The idea that a slice of the customer base has decided that the market is so broken that the financials work better to avoid Intel says they are way past the to greedy stage.

by lvl100 5y ago

kumarvvr 5y ago

> we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips Fortunately, only a handful of companies have the resources to do that. Unfortunately for Intel, those handful of companies are the biggest and only customers for large scale server farms.

Maakuth 5y ago

These companies are already not paying anything close to the list price, though.

the-dude 5y ago
And still they are developing their own ARMs.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
its not about the price but the ability to create chip that fit what you needs. For example: YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips. The biggest cost of making chip is the foundry and the foundry ecosystem have reduced the cost to where everyone can be a fabless and just outsource to foundry like TSMC and Samsung. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Intel IS competing against AMD mainly in the server space now. Of course at some point ARM and RISC-V servers will become mainstream, but it will take years. Intel is taking action now and it's aimed directly at AMD.

guiriduro 5y ago
ARM is already there in the cloud, cf AWS Graviton. With Apple's M1 in the laptop/desktop (mac mini) space, ARM and its superior power/performance ratio is a significant contender for mainstream compute now.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I know a few VPS distributors, and I've heard pretty mixed things about ARM's viability in the server space. Not only is it pretty expensive relative to x86, it's also pretty slow: you won't be getting SIMD instructions like AVX, which are huge in the server space. The only thing ARM has going for it is low IPC, but I really fail to see many applications where you could benefit from that, much less one where it would be worth the price premium over x86. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, ARM will be viable. But by then, we'll all be rocking RISC-V CPUs because someone realized that accelerating for specialized workloads isn't a crock of shit when 90% of your workload is video decoding.
  - Hikikomori 5y ago
    Maybe read a bit about Graviton? AllIntel/AMD instances in AWS has Graviton processors to handle network/disk IO unless its a very old instance type, large amounts of AWS own services run on it as well.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      The rumor is that Graviton instances are being sold at below cost for Amazon to put negotiating pressure on Intel/AMD. And that M1 only looks as good as it does because of Apple's de facto monopoly on TSMC 5nm. That AMD cores are more than competitive at the same node.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Too soon do people forget that there were budget Zen 2 SiPs whooping the M1's ass back in 2019. It was at the expense of a slightly higher power draw, but that's a price I'm entirely willing to pay for a full-fledged x86 chip. I reckon that I'll accept no substitutes until RISC-V hits the mainstream in a more major way.

swalsh 5y ago

After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.

jes 5y ago
Same. I’ve been loving my M1 Mac Mini for almost a year. Cool, silent, fast and compact.
dippersauce 5y ago
Before M1 my only exposure to ARM has been low-power SBCs and Android devices, and the experience was mediocre in the “just works” department. Poor hardware support, and a lack of proprietary software support. Performance was also lacking. Apple’s tight integration and high-end CPUs have resulted in a vastly better experience, but I want to have more options than just macOS and MacBooks. I think we’re trending in the right direction, but it’s going to be a while before (5 years IMO) before we see anything approaching competitive to the M-series chips from major market players. If Microsoft could fix their frankly horrid x86 compatibility on aarch64 devices thing would speed along nicely I think.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  > If Microsoft could fix their frankly horrid x86 compatibility on aarch64 device I don't think Microsoft is the real problem there, though. NT was developed to be portable and was working on architectures other than x86 in the beginning. So it was interesting when I heard things about "Windows on ARM" half a decade ago--and then the Surface RT. The RT was crap, but it did have real Windows NT working on non-Intel ARM, as was the OS on their Windows Series 10 phones or whatever. So Microsoft is already there on an OS level. It's the big software vendors that have to be corralled to switch somehow (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) Honestly .NET overall was probably at least in part Microsoft trying to get developers on something more CPU-agnostic to reduce dependence on x86.

javchz 5y ago

Yeah, Custom ARM / RISC-V chips or even ASIC/FPGAs could start threatening x86/AMD64 for datacenters and "clouds" sooner than we think.

dragontamer 5y ago
ARM maybe. But I'm not convinced that the ARM-alliance (Fujitsu, Apple, Ampere, Neoverse) is quite as unified as you might think. Apple has no apparent goals for cloud/servers, Fujitsu seems entirely focused on the Japanese market, and Ampere Altra isn't reaching critical mass (Amazon prefers a Neoverse rather than joining forces with Ampere / using Altra). As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/investments won't really be as aligned as Xeon and/or EPYC servers. HiFive / RISC-V aren't anywhere close to the server-tier.
- skohan 5y ago
  What about graviton? Isn't it already competitive with x86 on price/performance?
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Amazon doesn't offer graviton in the open market. You can only get those chips if you buy AWS. Graviton is a standard N1 neoverse core, which is slightly slower than a Skylake Xeon / Zen2 EPYC. There's hope that N2 will be faster, but even if it is, we don't really have an apples-to-apples comparison available (since Amazon doesn't sell that chip). The most likely source of Neoverse cores is the Ampere Altra, which is expected to have N2 cores shipping eventually. As usual though: since Ampere has lower shipping volume than other companies, the motherboards are very expensive. x86 (both Intel and AMD) have extremely high volumes: so from a TCO perspective, its hard to beat them, especially when you consider motherboard prices into the mix.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > As long as the ARM-community is fragmented Why does this matter? If popular OS distributions consistently target ARM-based CPUs, with a sufficient number of packages (esp. development-support-related) working on them, then who cares about fragmentation? An organization could buy systems with ARM chips and software will basically "just work". Same argument for consumer PCs, although there you have the MS Windows issue I guess.

StillBored 5y ago

Because in the past no one could justify competing with Intel. But the xeon parts with huge profit margins, and companies like apple which only tended to buy the high margin parts in their devices the business people realized that it was cheaper to produce their own. Which is outrageous, if you think about it given the amount of engineering investment required to build a competitive product. The idea that a slice of the customer base has decided that the market is so broken that the financials work better to avoid Intel says they are way past the to greedy stage.