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Intel seems awfully scared of Graviton2. Why pay for this ad on Google?
- totalZero 5y agoThey aren't trying to convince you that the competitor is worse. They're trying to convince you that switching isn't worth the hassle. It feels weird to watch Intel competing again, but we can't really expect them to sit on their hands. In a weird way, they have become an underdog while still dominating their core markets.
- CameronNemo 5y agoThey are an underdog in some respects, but data center and cloud computing is not one of them.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoTHey aren't dominating technically though, in engineering-driven markets. They are "dominating" because of likely anticompetitive agreements, inertia, and the like. Their ad (already a sort of plea/admission of weakness) basically relies on that inertia and structure. I guess it is good they aren't completely dismissive of AMD and Apple+ARM. The barbarians are at the gate. IBM was once invincible too. I also should note that ARM is particularly dangerous in EC2/aws. Setting up an ARM instance to try out is really easy compared to an x86 instance. All of a sudden, you realize an ARM platform on Linux is little additional effort from a package standpoint. Then some software maker realized setting up ARM test platforms is near-effortless in CI builds. Uhoh, the instruction set doesn't matter anymore.
- kumarvvr 5y ago> They aren't trying to convince you that the competitor is worse They are saying that performance on their chips is upto 1.8x faster in most common workloads. Also, doesn't need any expensive porting. They do compare performance, but have emphasized on cost and compatibility. If cloud computing has shown them anything, its that it is very difficult to be a monopoly player if your end users are insulated from your branding.
- klelatti 5y agoThey don’t say ‘most’ they say ‘many’ and the ‘up to’ is classic wording to limit the scope of what they are claiming. If this is the best defence of their performance vs AWS Arm they can come up with then they have a major problem.
- an9n 5y agoDeary me, I thought this 'trash your competitors' stuff went out with the dinosaurs. Does it really cut through any more?
- dang 5y agoPlease don't use titles like this. It's against the HN guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but it's not ok to use the title box for that. Here are three better options: (1) make a text post, describing what you observed (in this the Google ad), providing appropriate links, and giving your point of view; (2) submit the URL with the original title and add a comment to the thread explaining why you posted it. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (3) put up a blog post somewhere and submit that to HN instead (this is basically the same as (1) but on an external site).
- twodai 5y agoThank you for fighting the eternal September that is now prevelant in online message boards
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- fred_is_fred 5y agoWhy wouldn't Intel be scared if it's really 40% more perf for the same price. Once companies test the waters in AWS they may all wonder "why not for our on prem workloads too"?
- tormeh 5y agoIt's bad PR. Screams "you should definitely use Graviton and btw our marketing department is trash"
- ec109685 5y agoI don’t agree. If Graviton 2 is worse than Intel in some aspects, why shouldn’t Intel highlight that? That said, I believe graviton 3 has fixed many of these deficiencies.
- taffronaut 5y agoYes, like the Arm RISC-V announcement, it looks just amateurish and/or desperate marketing. In the Arm case I think some marketeer had gone rogue and the engineering org had the clout to shut it down.
- moralestapia 5y agoAnd what could the on-prem equivalent for Graviton be?
- fred_is_fred 5y agoI'm sure it will be coming soon.
- Twirrim 5y agoAmpere Altra, for one: https://amperecomputing.com/altra/ https://amperecomputing.com/altra/, who advertise systems through partner firms: https://solutions.amperecomputing.com/systems/altra#system_2u-mt%20jade%202s https://solutions.amperecomputing.com/systems/altra#system_2... Some benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16979/the-ampere-altra-max-review-pushing-it-to-128-cores-per-socket https://www.anandtech.com/show/16979/the-ampere-altra-max-re..., https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review Their chips are competitive with Graviton, as well as Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc.
- Waterluvian 5y ago“It depends…” is very true for almost all “which is faster for your workload?” questions. Trivializing “try them all out effortlessly and settle on the most economical outcome” seems like the best response any competitor could pose.
- CottonMcKnight 5y agoReminds me of the years Apple spent praising the superior performance of Motorola chips over Intel when running a couple of very specific Photoshop tasks.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAh, the days of the Gaussian Blur!
- ec109685 5y agoAltivec instructions FTW!
- ezekiel68 5y agoMust we project fear on a compay for responding to market developments? I feel like this is pretty normal behavior in any competitive landscape.
- topspin 5y agoPerfectly normal marketing FUD.
- cirrus3 5y agoThis does seem pretty cringe, but has anyone investigated if their points are legit/valid? Either way, the marketing for this message is pretty bad.
- mcny 5y agoI was and still remain pretty confused. From an outsider's perspective, my thought was Intel had incredibly massive profit margins pre Ryzen. So my thought was all Intel has to do is slash margins and it can continue to sell chips. Is it not that simple? I mean there has to be some price point at which whatever Intel wants to sell is what customers want to buy, right? In the mid to long term, Intel continues to innovate and eventually will get to the smaller numbers 7nm, 5nm, ... Is the margin that Intel has not as big as I had imagined? Is the idea of reduced margins so terrible that the money behind Intel (the stock market?) would rather let Intel die than accept a significantly lower rate of return? I know I'm missing something here and I don't know what it is...
- BobbyJo 5y ago> So my thought was all Intel has to do is slash margins and it can continue to sell chips. Is it not that simple? "Can't they just make less money?" No. They can't. Not without looking like they're dying, which will cause or hasten said death.
- pdimitar 5y agoAt one point they'll have to face the "choose the lesser evil" situation so IMO doing it sooner rather than later can help them. But hey, we'll wait and see.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoThe alternative is they still make less money, but now also have fewer sales to report.
- samspenc 5y agoThis is what I thought a few months as well and bought INTC (Intel stock) on the dip ... and it kept dipping. This is my guess now: yes, Intel is a massively profitable company. But I think what the market is factoring in is that it missed the technology shift to smaller chips (5nm?) which its competitors (Apple, TSMC, etc) are able to do. Further, Apple & ARM are eating into the mobile space, and AMD and NVidia are biting away at Intel's data center share. I think without a major tech break-through, Intel looks like it might miss this next semiconductor shift, and that's why the market is selling because it is starting to look like an also-ran at this point. Think IBM.
- 1123581321 5y agoReminds me of ARM’s campaign against RISC-V which backfired badly. Like this anti-Graviton ad, the copy for the anti-RISC campaign had the unintentional effect of underlining the major advantages of the technology they were attempting to criticize. https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/
- tadfisher 5y agoIronically, Intel is throwing its hat in with SiFive's and will be manufacturing high-performance RISC-V cores in 2022. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16780/intel-to-create-riscv-development-platform-with-sifive-p550-cores-on-7nm-in-2022 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16780/intel-to-create-riscv-d...
- deburo 5y agoNot only Risc-V, but Arm chips as well with their partnership with Qualcomm. I resl’y like their IFS initiative.
- CameronNemo 5y agoThe audacity of saying this: You may have heard that it’s no big deal to port your code from one architecture to another. However, porting takes time and money. It’s a complicated, intense process. Plus, ARM doesn’t run every software program out there, so when you’re ready to add new functionality from Intel, you’ll be stuck with the limitation of ARM and the long-term cost and hassle of managing multiple code bases. Then turning around and fabbing riscv cores is pretty sickening. If I was at SiFive I would be unenthusiastic about having Intel as a partner.
- rp1 5y agoAre they manufacturing the risc-v cores to be a drop in replacement for their current cores? Seems a little presumptuous to assume that.
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- pclmulqdq 5y agoIntel benefits from decades of being the preferred platform for people to optimize server software on. I would believe that they outperform Graviton on workloads that have done this (especially when they have optimized with AVX instructions), but tends to be near performance parity on other workloads. Databases and ML likely are winners for intel due to this optimization, while stuff like nginx performs just fine on the ARM chips.
- deadmutex 5y ago> Databases and ML likely are winners for intel due to this optimization Do you have data to back this up? Especially the Databases part. There is another post in this same thread that has numbers, but claims the opposite.
- pclmulqdq 5y agoI don't have much data here that's public. That said, Intel's AVX instructions generally give big advantages to range scans and other analytical workloads (as well as ML inference), while they don't help much for transaction processing. It depends on the DB and the workload. I would expect transactional benchmarks to look good for Graviton.
- wmf 5y agoUsername checks out!
- nacs 5y agoThis kind of marketing from Intel just makes them look worse. They have similar kind of “Don’t Leave Intel!” marketing against Apple’s M1 chips that comes off equally petty and desperate: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/intel-apple-ads https://www.creativebloq.com/news/intel-apple-ads
- azinman2 5y agoWhat should they do instead right now?
- mattlondon 5y ago> What should they do instead right now? Innovate. For years and years, Intel's approach has seemed to be just add an extra 100Mhz base clock and call it a new model. You appear to be getting largely the same chip on the same process for more or less the same performance compared to a chip from 18-24 months ago. Meanwhile AMD and Apple have come along with someone new and essentially are eat intel's lunch.
- charwalker 5y agoAnd do it with the same power envelopes as AMD! I can't run a 12600K without upgrading my PSU but a 5600X sips power and runs just fine. New Intel chips are exciting but not practical when it comes to power, cost, and availability not to mention lack of motherboards in the SFF space.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoAs an older Intel user, I don't see anything exciting since Ivy/Sandy, performance is just a few percent, an i7-2600 still won't be outdated anytime soon. Even people with an i7 920 didn't think upgrading to a 2500k was that worth it, and that had a 30% difference https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-920-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500K/1981vs619 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-920-vs-I... compared to the 5600X its 32% after almost a decade. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600X/619vs4084 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs...
- tyingq 5y agoIt's somewhat amusing they are serving ads pointing to this copy that doesn't mention Graviton3 at all.
- aledalgrande 5y agoYeah, I'm like, isn't Graviton 2 already old news?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoWhat, you expect them to compete fairly? It's Intel; they always pick the most... "favorable" benchmarks to compare, regardless of realism or apples-oranges issues.
- simplyaccont 5y agoThey are scared of aggressive graviton2 marketing by AWS. I was present at meeting with AWS during which it was pushed rather strongly to us with "it so much faster and so much cheaper". After meeting it took me effort beat sense into some people, i.e. to run some testing for our workloads instead of shifting stuff asap to graviton instances. If those ads make people pause and run actual tests, it's a win for them
- jiggawatts 5y agoMeanwhile I've been moving Intel workloads to AMD instances in the cloud wholesale, because it's a clear win pretty much 100% of the time. Intel is under attack from multiple angles.
- simplyaccont 5y agoamd is not graviton. they do have performance advantage. (and i still have somewhere amd k6 233 with hot603 motherboard). graviton is not clear cut
- starfallg 5y agoThe pricing for all of the instances types is controlled directly by Amazon. I can see this developing into a competition law issue with possible anti-trust action down the line given the size of the cloud providers.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt’s interesting that customers subscribing to Amazon prime eventually created a mega trust that is now trying to compete with the semiconductor industry. It would be fun to play this out where Amazon starts a bank, a car company, a rocket ship company, etc. just to see how large it could possibly get.
- harpratap 5y agoYou can look at East Asia and see what happens. Chaebols from SK, Zaibatsu and keiretsu from Japan.
- ethbr0 5y ago+Health care insurance.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoAMZN already dipped their toes once and pulled back: https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed UNH, Anthem, CVS, Humana, Cigna, Centene all earn low single digit profit margins, are extremely heavily regulated, and deal with healthcare providers that frequently have monopolies in their region. I doubt it is worth trying to get into that business to try and capture the extra 3% profit margin they are currently paying to a managed care organization (aka health insurer).
- ethbr0 5y agoHaving worked inside half of those, there's a huge amount of administrative waste clouding margin. ACA admin caps provided some pressure on that (the first in decades), but the amount of money burnt on bad or incompetent ideas is still staggering. The HBR article's note about patient monopoly within a geographic area being key to provider price negotiation is a good observation. Provider consolidation was driven by other factors (stability, survival), but it's definitely shifted the balance in insurer v provider negoations.
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- marcodiego 5y agoMakes me remeber this: https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI had hoped Cavium would challenge Intel server space back ca. 2017, but they went HPC. Then I thought Ampere would do it, but their volumes are just minuscule for reasons I don't understand. I am surprised to see Amazon finally scare Intel.
- selfhoster11 5y agoIf the Cavium experience of AWS HSM is at all reflective of what a Cavium-dominated server space would look like... I'd probably just switch to gardening at that point.
- ethbr0 5y agoBecause if Amazon had adopted Cavium or Ampere, it wouldn't have fundamentally changed their strategic outlook. Different, cheaper supplier, but still a supplier. By vertically integrating, Amazon gets to pocket that high margin revenue, as well as decide their own destiny.
- ksec 5y agoIsn't the headline against the rule on HN? AWS represent ~50% of hyperscaler. ~50% of EC2 are now on Graviton and limited by Fab capacity. It is a much bigger threat than AMD. >1.65x higher MongoDB v4.4.1 Enterprise, Storage/Instance: EBS io1 2x 800GB, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5, 25Gbps for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0-1025-aws. >1.76x higher MySQL 8.0.20, HammerDB v3.2, Storage/Instance: EBS io1 1x 800GB, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5, 25Gbps for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0-1029-aws. >1.19x higher PostgreSQL 13.1, HammerDB v4.0, Storage: SSD, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5 and AWS default for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0. Their claimed performance above, probably better for everyone to make their own judgement.
- karmasimida 5y ago> 50% of EC2 are now on Graviton and limited by Fab capacity Any quote for this number? I googled it but can't find source, and it isn't my experience either.
- ksec 5y agoIt was on one of the slides in ReInvent and I remember it was 4x%. But strange I cant find it either. ( I thought it would be easy ) The percentage was on new installation. Will dig this up once I have time to fact check.
- throwaway744678 5y ago> Isn't the headline against the rule on HN? Yep, it perhaps would have been better with a [Ask HN] title and the link in the post.
- mdasen 5y agoOf course they're scared. Even if Intel is able to close performance gaps, cloud computing is often an easy sell for ARM and Amazon is likely going to be able to get the chips cheaper given that they're looking for markup on the service end while Intel needs markup on the chip. If I'm writing new software using Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, etc. it's easy to deploy to ARM. With Apple moving to ARM and 25% of developers using Macs (41-45% using Windows)*, there's going to be good ARM support for what developers need. Sure, some things might might run better on Intel and some things might not easily port, but that feels like it isn't the case for the majority of stuff that developers are going to be doing. It seems likely that Microsoft and Google will introduce ARM-based instances. We know Google has dipped its toe in with its Tensor processor for the Pixel. We've seen reports that Microsoft has been working on ARM processors for servers. Qualcomm is gearing up for a major push into better ARM processors to compete with Apple on the desktop/laptop, but presumably they'd be happy to get cloud workloads as well. Oracle, while not a major cloud provider, has ARM-based instances already. Intel has had a virtual monopoly for 20 years. Now they're facing a resurgent AMD stealing x86 marketshare and ARM processors that are quickly becoming a better price/performance option - and Apple is ensuring that everything developers need will be ARM compatible. I don't think it's an existential threat, but there's a huge difference between the margins you get as a virtual monopoly and the margins you get when you have to compete against strong competitors. Plus, I'd guess that AWS is probably making sweet margins off those Graviton instances. Let's say that their margin on Intel instances is X and that margin on Graviton is 2X. That leaves AWS a lot of room to start pushing Intel out of their datacenters as old hardware is replaced. Let's say you're a company spending $100M/year with AWS and you're renewing your contract. Maybe Amazon suggests that they could give you a 20% discount off Intel boxes and a 40% discount off Graviton boxes - which they say are already 20% better price/performance so it's basically 52% off! It also gives AWS negotiating power with Intel. If 20% of AWS customers move to Graviton, you can go to Intel and say, "we're finding Graviton processors really cheap to make and operate and customers are loving them...more and more they're realizing they don't need your Intel processors...if we don't get cheaper Intel processors, we might have to accelerate our incentives to get people onto Graviton boxes...the more we accelerate that, the more Google Cloud and Azure will likely want to prioritize ARM boxes..." They're scared because it's the type of thing that snowballs until their lock-in is near meaningless. If ARM becomes 50% of the server market, there goes Intel's ability to demand high margins. 5-10 years from now, most deployments could use Intel or ARM based on price/performance rather than instruction set - and that makes life a lot harder for Intel. The problem with this ad/page is that the ship has already sailed. Once Apple introduced its M1 MacBooks, we were getting first-class ARM support for everything developers would need going forward. It didn't happen overnight, but with Apple going all-in on ARM chips and with Macs being such a big player in developer usage, the war was lost that day. Now it's just a matter of time. Once all your devs are running and testing their stuff on an M1 MacBook, why not deploy it to an ARM instance? * From StackOverflow's 2021 developer survey
- Svetlitski 5y agoThat they claim as one of their benefits that Intel chips have better security than ARM is just laughable in light of the myriad speculative execution vulnerabilities present in x86 chips.
- baq 5y agomeltdown and spectre are 4 years old, at least two generations of chips have been made since by everyone in the industry.
- selfhoster11 5y agoMost companies are not discarding 4 year old servers.
- baq 5y agoso are there graviton 2 servers which are 4 years old?
- selfhoster11 5y agoThat's not the point. When told to jump, most companies tend not to ask "how high?", but rather "why, and how did you get into my office anyway?". They simply won't bin useful hardware because of hypothetical (to them) security issues.
- mhh__ 5y agoIntel were by far the worst affected but the basic speculation attack (spectre) will be with us for years. Basically all modern processors are iterations on roughly the same idea, there is no x86 in this regard.
- dilyevsky 5y agoYes I chuckled the most on this one. Given the fact that graviton 2 doesn’t have smt so they sell you actual physical cores instead of inherently and irreparably insecure intels hyperthreading crap cores this point is just laughable.
- zucker42 5y agoThis reminds me of the much maligned anti-RISC-V website created ARM a little while back.
- travisd 5y ago> Just say NO to single-cloud porting This reads more like a DARE slogan than a publication from a major technology company.
- klelatti 5y agoFrom the firm that pioneered single sourcing for CPUs with the 386!
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoFor bonus points, it leaves an opening for obvious alternatives... Just say NO to single-vendor computing. Just say NO to single-ISA computing.
- makapuf 5y agoYes, and of all things, the irony of Intel warning about single source vendors...
- tiahura 5y agoI didn’t realize Intel has such a diverse workforce.
- DSingularity 5y agoThe security section is hilarious
- alasdair_ 5y agoThis ad reminds me of the way it felt to work at Sun Microsystems around 2002, when all the engineers knew that cheap GNU Linux boxes were the future. The marketing people had similar FUD-based ads about how the TCO of Linux was higher, how certain HPC jobs wouldn’t run well etc. super similar to this Intel ad today.
- panick21_ 5y agoIf only Sun had continued with x86 in the early 1990s and Open Sourced Solaris. The world would look very different now I think.
- meepmorp 5y agoSun did open source Solaris, though after the 90s.
- panick21_ 5y agoOf course I know that, but they did it after Linux started to get broad adoption as a reaction, rather then proactively doing so.
- guiriduro 5y agoand the world had to wait 10 extra years for containerised workloads to be popularised in docker instead of zones.
- meepmorp 5y agoI remember seeing VMWare for the first time and thinking it was about time the non-mainframe world made it into the 70s.
- panick21_ 5y agoWell even when Zones in Open Source existed almost nobody used them. That said they were only available in few places and Solaris Open Source never fully took off. I think the reason is that they thought of them as an operational tool. Its basically a cheap VM. However, led to crazy docker adoption was its use as a dev-tool and in development making it really easy to run simply stuff. Only then people started thinking about using this seriously deploy application on mass scale with docker. And then they realized that containers on Linux were just patchwork and the security story was a mess. Zones were developed to serve as VM replacements, so for them security and resource management was very important.
- kristianov 5y agoThe multicloud argument is so weak...All the big players are working on their own CPUs.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> No one wants to limit their business agility by locking into a specific solution. "And that's why you should go all in on Intel-flavored x86 and avoid writing portable software!" Honestly. Just... Can they hear themselves?
- MangoCoffee 5y agois it game over for Wintel? if Microsoft come out with its own ARM chip and an decent Windows ARM OS?
- floatboth 5y agoSo far they're all-in on Qualcomm, right now really held back by their unimpressive performance (mildly customized/rebadged Cortex cores with tiny caches for some reason) but let's see what happens after Nuvia cores happen.
- jfrunyon 5y agoI'm not sure that running an ad means what you think it does. Businesses market against their competitors all the time.
- forty 5y agoSome anecdotal experience: - we switched our nodejs workload to graviton (c6g from c5), and it resulted in needing more instances, which ended up costing nearly exactly the same price - ARM is annoying in practice for some stuff (we build our docker images on our CI which is on premise and not ARM) - AWS pushed a bit to have us move to graviton - Where are the c6a ? :)
- philliphaydon 5y agoI moved a .net core project to t4g from t3 and it resulted in lower cpu utilisation and requests being returned quicker.
- zapdrive 5y agoNice try, Intel.
- forty 5y agoHaha at home I'm an AMD fanboy - personal laptop is a Ryzen 4750u - and I happen to collect ARM single board computers, so I think I'm pretty open minded when it comes to CPU choice (and btw in those c6a instances I'd love to try, the "a" means AMD ^^)
- eric-hu 5y agoCan you describe more about the nature of your workloads?
- forty 5y agoThose are HTTP APIs which are mostly reading from MySQL and S3. They are running on nodejs 12 (soon 16 ^^). They are using quite a lot of CPU, probably mostly due to having to parse large amount of JSON, and a bunch of cryptographic operations (mostly hmacs, AES - we are only using nodejs built-in crypto primitive) - but I don't know for sure to be honest - hence the choice of C type instances.
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- jug 5y agoThis looks like desperation because they simultaneously acknowledge the competitor which is normally a big no-no? It's like Mark Penn's Scroogled campaign all over again.
- klelatti 5y agoWhat does this say to an AWS customer who hasn’t previously considered Graviton (probably the majority). I’d argue something like: ‘Wow. Intel is conceding that Graviton is faster for some workloads and seems to be really concerned about it. We should do a detailed cost benefit analysis.’ Completely counterproductive in my view.