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Anyone who would know the fine grained differences is almost certainly NDA'd up quite tightly. But it's likely things like different core counts, frequency per
by Syonyk 5y ago
Anyone who would know the fine grained differences is almost certainly NDA'd up quite tightly.
But it's likely things like different core counts, frequency performance curves, perhaps more or different memory/IO controller counts, perhaps instruction extensions of some particular interest (I'd wager BF16 was available in data center SKUs long before consumer SKUs), etc.
It's nothing radical, but if you're going to buy an awful lot of them and want something slightly custom, Intel will definitely do that for you.
- javajosh 5y agoWhat kind of levers do big ISPs/cloud providers want over their CPUs, other than the basic efficiency gains we all want? Isn't it risky doing any customization since you don't get commodity pricing?
- to11mtm 5y ago> Isn't it risky doing any customization since you don't get commodity pricing? Depends on how many you order and how reasonable the customization is. Like, what if I wanted a 10,000 38 core Xeons with a 2.5GHz Base clock and 3.5GHz Turbo clock? Such a part doesn't exist, yet sits smack dab between two existing Models, the Xeon Platnium 8368 and 8368Q. Assuming yields are already good enough, that might be the sort of thing a CPU maker will do. (Might need more than 10k units though, IDK.)
- baq 5y agoI'd wager Pat doesn't get out of bed for 10k units and neither does Lisa.
- swiftcoder 5y agoAt AWS scale you can feasibly just buy up the entire run of chips. What's a few million CPUs more or less between friends?
- mywittyname 5y agoAdditionally, Amazon is absolutely the type of company to create their own x86 processor if Intel/AMD are unwilling to make some customization. Intel does not want to be competing with an Amazon Basics processor.
- Grazester 5y agoYou basically need a license for X86 from Intel for this. Do you think x86 is open source!
- folmar 5y agoThe usual line of operation is to include VIA in the operation.
- swiftcoder 5y agoThey already have pretty significant investment in their own ARM-based chips for servers. Given Apple's recent success in x86 emulation on ARM, I doubt it's worth the trouble of directly competing in the x86 arena.
- wolf550e 5y agoIt's unlikely a different die (silicon chip), so the usual number of cores and usual size of caches, and it's unlikely that AWS gets a secret x86 instruction unlockable via msr or something like that. It's probably just constants for the frequency scaling (e.g. all cores and single core turbo). Cloudflare mentioned they use a custom Intel SKU on their blog, and they're not as big as AWS.
- ghbe44 5y agoI’m familiar with Google’s custom SKUs, and I assure you they’re unique enough to experience microcode bugs nobody else on the planet ever hits. There was a weird FDIV one back in the day that wasn’t the same FDIV bug that hit us all a long time ago. Cloudflare isn’t really at that customization table. Your take sounds accurate for non-FAANGs (and a couple of those). For Google, not so much. There is a lot of custom acceleration and such that isn’t available to any other customer, and a nearby commenter is right, every detail about them is locked behind a very strong NDA. I’ve heard thirdhand AWS does indeed have custom instructions in the virtualization extensions stuff, but don’t know if that’s true.
- monocasa 5y agoMy understanding is that Google's SKUs are the same die. Non Google versions just have the Google specific silicon fused off, or require a MSR knock sequence to turn on.
- ghbe44 5y ago> I'd wager BF16 was available in data center SKUs long before consumer SKUs Right you are, Ken.