11 ms·
Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world
- ChatGTP 3y agoWhat exactly happens to old hardware? Is it easily recyclable ?
- rvense 3y agoAs far as I understand it, electronics are recycled by crushing them and extracting a handful of minerals - e.g. gold, there's more gold in circuit boards than the rocks they dig out of gold mines I've heard. The rest - which by mass, of course, is something approaching "all of it" - is mostly toxic fibre glass, epoxy and plastic that we don't really know what to do with. It's bad, even before you start talking about all the electricity and heat that was used to turn it into electronics in the first place.
- trustingtrust 3y ago>toxic fibre glass, epoxy and plastic I’m guessing there are no environmentally friendly alternatives to these materials than can be easily swapped in factories without much hassle.
- mschuster91 3y agoActually, there are companies working on PCBs based on organic, water-soluble substrates [1] - to recycle a board, you boil it in some hot water and get a liquid stream containing the substrate and a solid stream containing the electronic components and copper traces. [1] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/new-biodegradable-circuit-board-reduce-electrics-environmental-footprint https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/new-biodegrada...
- r0b1n 3y agoWhich is a researach-stage idea with obvious drawbacks: Moisture in air will also slowly decompose PCBs, making them age much faster than traditional epoxy-based PCBs. So then you either limit the maximum age of all your products severely (not very green) or you need additional materials to moisture-proof all your casings (also not very green).
- mschuster91 3y agoIf I understand it correctly, their idea is to use a binding polymer that needs heat to dissolve.
- acdha 3y agoDo you really think that they haven’t spent at least as much time thinking about this? The question would be whether those devices are replaced in less than the time it takes for natural degradation to cause problems, and both of your “not very green” dismissals sound entirely too pat. The entire reason we’re talking about this is that the industry has a huge problem with things having a service life measured in single digit years and a landfill life measured in centuries – making those easier to recycle would be a huge win because there’s no way that the current model is going to get the service life significantly closer to that kind of timeframe.
- r0b1n 3y agoFrom the article that was linked: > The research will also provide Infineon with a fundamental understanding of the design and reliability challenges customers face with the new material in their core applications. That is corporate-speak for: they have no idea.
- acdha 3y agoIt sounds more like they know that this is a hard problem requiring foundational research, and suggests that rather more thought has gone into it than a quick HN comment dismissing their work.
- fransje26 3y ago> Is it easily recyclable ? And therefore, as a whole, the answer to that is: NO.
- ChatGTP 3y agoQuite concerning really, it seems there is absolutely no limit to the rubbish beast now the AI race has kicked off.
- r0b1n 3y agoMy significant other worked in a recycling plant. To elaborate on the "rest" and how it is done: PCBs get delivered, sometimes without big components (coolers, screws/brackets fans removed), but also sometimes with those. They are shredded as a whole, including all soldered components, to a particle size of 2mm. Iron and aluminium are separated magnetically (in case of aluminium with an eddy current separator, iron with a static field). All three components, mostly-iron, mostly-aluminium and the rest are then melted down separately. Adherent plastics, electrolytes, epoxy, etc burn off during this process. Gas and ash are lead through separators that filter out the fly-ash as much as possible, which is buried somewhere as toxic waste, the rest is entered into the atmosphere after cleaning (afaik various liquids to bubble through to wash out soluble chemicals, which are then dried and buried). All three metalllic liquids are then metall alloys of various purities which are then cleaned and separated further by skimming off the slag, adding flux, electrolysis and other chemical separation methods. Most of the "other" fraction is copper, which is the main product overall, other rare metals such as gold occur in far smaller amounts and seemingly add only a little to the overall earnings in the process. Please note that this is the process used in a relatively new plant in a Western European nation. I guess the "advantage" over the rest of the world is that at least there is a fly-ash separator and exhaust cleaning.
- frereubu 3y agoThanks for this. Really interesting.
- speed_spread 3y agoIf by recyclable you meant buying old racks of datacenter servers to reuse elsewhere, even if possible, it's not very practical. Servers are super noisy and may have exotic power requirements.
- sgarland 3y agor/homelab would like a word.
- throwaway154 3y agoWhile there are probably more modern servers around now than ever before, from browsing serverhunter.com there seem to be a couple of cliffs where older CPUs gets rarer, one at 2017 and one at 2014.
- rusteh1 3y agoAmazon has a reuse program for old hardware[1]. Disks will be shredded on-site and then recycled. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/how-aws-data-centers-reuse-retired-hardware https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/how-aws-data-centers-re...
- andrewstuart 3y agoI tried Arm on EC2 but random reboots and hangs sent me back to Intel.
- anshargal 3y agoInteresting. I never even considered the instance stability to be a risk when using ARM CPUs on Amazon. Anybody else can share their experience?
- minimaul 3y agoOn a mix of Graviton2 and 3 based instances, we’ve found no significant difference between ARM, Intel, and AMD instances for weird problems/instance replacement, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- electroly 3y agoCan't corroborate. We have not had any issues with Graviton (mix of r7g and t4g today, previously we used r6g and that was fine too).
- j16sdiz 3y agoMy ARM server on EC2 work better than the intel one. They are low—end, low—load servers, if that matter.
- PaywallBuster 3y agoI moved RDS and Elasticache to ARM with no issues for over a year ago For EC2 only used it for a single instance where I could redeploy the app easier by picking an ARM image
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoI tried Ampere Altra on Hetzner, it was unparallel price/performance wise. But it kept falling into low frequency state (1 GHz on all 80 cores). That's either something in the motherboard or in the processor, couldn't figure it out. Guess not mature enough yet.
- fourfour3 3y agoEntirely unsurprising - we know Amazon uses their own ARM CPUs internally for large swathes of AWS infra and services. None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here. My employer is moving workloads to ARM on AWS as it’s much better for price/perf, and our shiny new M1/M2 Macs run the same binaries. We’ve had very little issue doing the shift - Amazon Linux and Debian both support ARM well. Must be really putting a dent in Intel’s data centre sales though.
- TheDong 3y ago> and our shiny new M1/M2 Macs run the same binaries Does that mean you're all running asahi linux, or are you somehow running linux elf binaries on macOS? Or are you using VMs, just like the x86 + docker desktop folks are doing to run the same binaries on their laptops and servers?
- minimaul 3y agoVMs through things like Docker for Mac, in our case. And yes - it’s exactly the same as you can do if you use x86 servers and dev machines. It’s just the fact that we can also do this for ARM on hardware that doesn’t suck that makes using ARM in production more practical for us.
- bravura 3y agoSorry I missed the details: "Does that mean you're all running asahi linux or are you somehow running linux elf binaries on macOS?" So you're running whatever linux districtuion you want or some particular flavor through Docker on Mac? And you don't have ELF binaries because you're using precompiled packages for ARM and don't need weirdo prebuilt ELFs, or you have a workaround?
- minimaul 3y agoWe deploy containers to production, and use variants of the same containers for local development - mostly Debian. Those containers contain a mix of custom built software and packages from the distro.
- oefrha 3y agoArticle says Amazon accounts for >50% while China accounts for 40%, so Amazon actually has >80% outside China. I wonder why Microsoft and Google aren’t as eager to stop paying the x86 tax.
- j16sdiz 3y agoGoogle is doing their own server ARM chips: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_own_custom/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...
- iLoveOncall 3y agoAmazon serves traffic to China, they have an AWS region there I think.
- mcbain 3y agoThree. Two operated by other companies (in Beijing and Ningxia) that are only available in China, and Hong Kong which appears to be just another AWS region available globally.
- whoevercares 3y agoVery little traffic for AWS China regions
- qbasic_forever 3y agoMicrosoft has been abysmally slow to move towards ARM. They hitched their wagon to Qualcomm and snapdragon... which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol). Windows on ARM for servers has been a bit of a pipe dream and joke--I think they finally have it available but I stopped looking or caring about it years ago. Amazon is the defacto ARM in the cloud/server leader right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- snvzz 3y ago>which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol). I politely disagree. We know for a fact, from December's RISC-V Summit, that Microsoft is influencing RISC-V to ease the burden on their own Windows for RISC-V effort. Qualcomm was a partner for ARM, and they are already used to working with them. They will likely be partners again, with RISC-V devices this time around. And Windows for ARM will go the same way as Windows for Alpha. Just an historical footnote. RISC-V is inevitable.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI wonder if Google, Microsoft, Facebook aren't considering using ARM in their datacenters.
- j16sdiz 3y agoBoth Google and Microsoft have ARM in their VM offer. Facebook have been flip-flop’ing on their ARM server: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/146850-facebook-arm-x86-and-the-future-of-the-data-center https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/146850-facebook-arm-x86-...
- skinner927 3y agoThat’s a 10 year old article
- unnah 3y agoThe Register does not report any absolute numbers and the source appears to be a proprietary market research report. Is the actual number of ARM or x86 CPUs at Amazon publically available?
- throwaway154 3y agoIf Amazon's heralding something more general, I'm curious what a move to ARM will do to server side async and sync/async trade-off with waiting tasks/io. Less potential point if 20 threads/cores can be had for the price of 1? Or, what they've changed to take advantage of the difference.
- Koala_ice 3y agoThe new HPC Graviton3E instances (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/hpc7g/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/hpc7g/) are pretty great for CFD and simulation workloads.
- dijit 3y agoI don't doubt it, as a private individual buying Ampere Altra CPU's has been pretty painful -- at least in Europe. I could only buy 4 in the end. Sidenote: has anyone noticed that there's no price difference for GCP to use ARM?
- fortran77 3y agoI got an ARM Windows 11 laptop (Lenovo X13s) because I wanted a lightweight travel laptop with long batter life. I was expecting a big compromise, but it's actually wonderful! I'm a giant Intel fanboy, but I think they have a real challenge here.
- acdha 3y agoIntel definitely has a challenge – having gone through both of Apple’s PowerPC migrations, this was the smoothest yet because we’re in a much better place with open source software dominating and internet distribution being the norm. I remember things being held up by proprietary compilers or needing to port hand rolled assembly but this time around we’re using higher level languages & frameworks a lot more and it’s been mostly transparent. Similarly, back then getting hardware to build and test was a chore; now it’s a checkbox in the EC2 launch options. Thinking about it, I knew that Intel not landing the first iPhone contract was a big loss on mobile but I don’t think anyone expected it to savage their traditional strongholds like this because that paved the way for so many tools not just being ported but heavily optimized for ARM. They’re certainly still doing a ton of business but now there’s a cap on how much profit they can take even if AMD completely founders.
- seltzered_ 3y agoThe funny thing is that roughly a decade ago AMD literally was prototyping an ARM CPU presumably for server use. I recall hearing about 2014 - AMD Opteron A1100: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.anandtech.com/show/8362/amds-big-bet-on-arm-powered-servers-a1100-revealed https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.anandtech.com/show/... The startup Calxeda (2008-2013) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda Intel also had the 'xscale' ARM chips back in the late 2000s
- acdha 3y agoI don’t want to say it’s all the iPhone but I do think it’s not a coincidence that things are very different now that we have robust tools like Clang and over a decade of compatibility patches throughout the open source world. In 2008 even Java developers tended to be antsy about running on non-x86 hardware. A decade later it’s close to a non-issue for a staggering amount of stuff.
- sneak 3y agoI wonder how many Apple are using for ML and related server stuff.
- boristane 3y agoGraviton server and serverless functions have shown such a better performance to cost ratio, it's unsurprising Amazon is doubling down on those. The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips?
- zokier 3y ago> The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips? I suspect the answer is simple; they are nowhere near as flush with cash to buy up a CPU company and invest years to make their own chips. It's no small endeavor that AWS has gone through to get here.
- acdha 3y agoNot just cash but also willing to make investments which don’t show returns within a year. Amazon has a history of very lean profits due to reinvestment and something like this might not be possible with Google’s promotion culture, especially adoption takes time so the initial numbers won’t be compelling.
- jsnell 3y agoMicrosoft and Google are far more flush with cash than Amazon is. Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. Here's an alternative equally simple explanation: ARM doesn't actually have anywhere near the level of advantage in perf/$ that Amazon's pricing would imply. The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons.
- dangus 3y agoAmpere ARM chips still have a similar price advantage (check out Hetzner cloud pricing, for example).
- mschuster91 3y ago> Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. CPUs that need an insane amount of power and have barely any applications in mainstream computing. Not exactly a good fit to provide to customers. > The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons. By running their own CPUs, AWS doesn't have to rely on Intel's ability and willingness to ship stuff and they don't have to pay Intel's margin either.
- snvzz 3y agoThat's gonna be fun when Amazon switches to RISC-V for their next (or next+n) iteration of Graviton. ARM presence in the server market will go away like poof. More than half of it.
- ukuina 3y agoWhat indication exists that Amazon is considering RISC?
- geerlingguy 3y agoNone, currently.
- klysm 3y agoIt’s mere existence. If Amazon isn’t considering it I’d be surprised.
- qwytw 3y agoWouldn't designing your own cores be on a whole other level compared to what Amazon is doing now (licensing Neoverse)? If they don't feel confident they could build a competitive ARM core on their own (unlike Ampere which seems to be trying that) why would it be different with RISC-V which is still years behind ARM (on the high-end)?
- snvzz 3y agoIf not designing their own cores, RISC-V has far more options than ARM to license from. From a business continuity perspective, Amazon doesn't benefit from being locked to a single vendor for its CPU core IP.
- qwytw 3y ago> RISC-V has far more options Like what? Are there any high-end RISC-V cores that proven to be competitive with Neoverse you could license? It all just seem hypothetical to me at this point and I really struggle trying to understand who and why would design cores to license them to others? Looking at ARM it just doesen't seem like a great business model compared to making them yourself..
- varispeed 3y agoTime to change the name to Armazon.
- anagri 3y agoThe X86 vs ARM makes for such a great story. One prefers locking and complicated instructions, the other is designed with open and simplicity. At one point, Intel seemed to be dominant, and proven right with their proprietary tech, where as ARM chugged along keeping a low profile, and keep doing the good work. Now, finally the reality has caught up with them, and turns out openness and simplicity is finally taking a lead. Stick to your principles FTW!!!
- fluoridation 3y agoPretty sure ARM is proprietary.
- imtringued 3y agoI don't think it can get more proprietary than running your code on a machine that isn't accessible to the general public.
- snvzz 3y ago>running your code on a machine that isn't accessible to the general public. What machine is this?
- tacker2000 3y agoHow is ARM open? And simplicity is also subjective… x86 goes way back thats why it seems more complicated or “crufty”. ARM is a huge corp like anyone else. ARM got a huge boost now since everything is switching to mobile and their chips are more energy efficient than Intels. Added to that Intel was also asleep at the wheel and missed the mobile boat…
- patmorgan23 3y agoARM chips are more energy efficient because they're simpler. Less gates/instructions = less power usage.
- sam_goody 3y agoWhy would Amazon develop a custom Arm chip and not RISC-V? Don't they have to pay a fee to Arm for this, even though it is being developed by them? And would Google (which is allegedly developing their own Arm Chip) and Apple (which also has their own chip) not also benefit from backing Risc-V as well? I have not been able to get clear in my head the relationship between Risc-V and Arm, and even more so exactly what responsibility down stream each user has. Would appreciate the some ELI5 from knowledgeable HNers. --- Slightly related: is it more or less a given that eventually no one will use x64 chips (since Arm/Risc-V is more efficient)? If not for servers, is it at least a given for desktop computers, as more software is written for ARM, and re-compilers like Rosseta improve? If so, I know that Intel is investing in RISC-V, but has AMD given up the space entirely?
- acegopher 3y agoBecause by paying a fee to Arm, they get decades of architecture experience, support, peripherals (including a well-thought-out internal BUS), etc. RISC-V has a good ISA, but there currently isn't a lot of silicon experience in the real world (relative to Arm and Intel, for example). And Amazon isn't going to roll their own to that degree. It's not worth the meager licensing costs. It's like the difference between deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Arch Linux. Each has it's place, but right now its advantages are in much different areas.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- minimaul 3y agoThe most common use case is where ARM provide fully functional CPU core IP that you can put into your own SoC - in AWS Graviton's case that seems to be the ARM Neoverse line of cores. You can also get architecture licenses where you can implement your own CPU core (from scratch, or by making tweaks to an ARM design) - Apple has one of these, but Apple is a special case in that they were one of the original partners when ARM was originally founded in 1990. RISC-V on the other hand is an architecture that is open for anyone to implement, but the RISC-V foundation doesn't sell you a core design - you need to create your own, or find a partner to sell you one. It's also much newer, so there's less of an ecosystem around it compared to ARM.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoWhat would a CPU instruction set look like to minimise energy costs for server workloads? And do spinning hard drives use more energy than SSDs?
- bluedino 3y agoWhere are people (that aren't Amazon) buying ARM servers to put in their datacenters? They seem hard to find or actually order.
- lizknope 3y agoThe big hyperscale datacenter companies either design it themselves or partner with another large semiconductor company to help them design it for their particular needs. These companies are not interested in selling to small companies that just want 1 to 100 machines. The only company that might is Ampere. https://www.asacomputers.com/arm-servers.html https://www.asacomputers.com/arm-servers.html Oracle is using the ARM server chip from Ampere but they would be buying tens of thousands or more and getting volume discount pricing. I've heard rumors that Ampere customized their chip for Oracle's needs. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ Qualcomm was designing an ARM server chip about 8 years ago but killed the project. Most of those engineers went to Microsoft and now ARM itself. I've heard stories about Chinese hyperscale datacenters wanting to design their own ARM servers but I haven't heard anything in a while.
- pulketo 3y agoWhat could go wrong? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
- perryizgr8 3y agoIs there any scientific comparison between AWS amd64 and arm instances for performance and cost? I tried running some stuff on an arm instance but it seemed to similar in both price and performance to amd64. Just with added complexity to make it work nicely with Github actions built container images.
- rkagerer 3y agoOut of curiosity is the timing of this Bernstein Research report and the upcoming Arm IPO a coincidence?