3 ms·

> I don't know anyone who is buying or recommending Intel CPUs at the moment. Aren’t the major cloud providers still mainly running on and buying Intel?

cantaloupe 4y ago
AWS developed two generations of an in-house ARM chip (Graviton), which I think is cheaper for an equivalent power to an x86 instance. Cloudflare has also begun switching to ARM, for 57% more performance per watt: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  IIRC GCP is using AMD EPYC. Not sure about Azure.
  - jhickok 4y ago
    Azure uses Intel, AMD and Ampere. You implicitly select your CPU when you pick the virtual machine family: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-naming-conventions#naming-convention-explanation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-...
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    GCP offers instances on many processors, including AMD EPYC: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-processors-come-to-google-and-to-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-proc.... Here's another one: https://cloud.google.com/intel/ https://cloud.google.com/intel/
m_mueller 4y ago
ARM is increasingly being a factor there afaik.
llbeansandrice 4y ago
The past 2 companies I've been at have or had huge efforts to migrate large parts of infrastructure to AWS Graviton which are 64-bit ARM iirc.
jen20 4y ago
AWS certainly offer AMD boxes as well (M5a, M6a, T3a etc), but nothing like the broad range of Intels, and not even the same kind of offerings as Graviton.
hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
The cloud providers have been buying Intel for years and can't afford to just throw thos chips away. AMD is capturing a much larger proportion of data center CPU sales, but you should still expect to see them buying Intel as well, since AMD can't produce enough chips to satisfy all demand. Also, qualifying new platforms is very expensive so cloud providers will continue to buy already-qualified platforms for as long as the perf/W makes sense.

cantaloupe 4y ago

AWS developed two generations of an in-house ARM chip (Graviton), which I think is cheaper for an equivalent power to an x86 instance. Cloudflare has also begun switching to ARM, for 57% more performance per watt: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...

CameronNemo 4y ago
IIRC GCP is using AMD EPYC. Not sure about Azure.
- jhickok 4y ago
  Azure uses Intel, AMD and Ampere. You implicitly select your CPU when you pick the virtual machine family: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-naming-conventions#naming-convention-explanation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-...
- saagarjha 4y ago
  GCP offers instances on many processors, including AMD EPYC: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-processors-come-to-google-and-to-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-proc.... Here's another one: https://cloud.google.com/intel/ https://cloud.google.com/intel/

m_mueller 4y ago

ARM is increasingly being a factor there afaik.

llbeansandrice 4y ago

The past 2 companies I've been at have or had huge efforts to migrate large parts of infrastructure to AWS Graviton which are 64-bit ARM iirc.

jen20 4y ago

AWS certainly offer AMD boxes as well (M5a, M6a, T3a etc), but nothing like the broad range of Intels, and not even the same kind of offerings as Graviton.

hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago

The cloud providers have been buying Intel for years and can't afford to just throw thos chips away. AMD is capturing a much larger proportion of data center CPU sales, but you should still expect to see them buying Intel as well, since AMD can't produce enough chips to satisfy all demand. Also, qualifying new platforms is very expensive so cloud providers will continue to buy already-qualified platforms for as long as the perf/W makes sense.