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Microsoft 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,

by jsnell 3y ago

Microsoft 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 ago
Ampere 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.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > 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. Obviously there's no real market for Sparc or POWER in the public cloud, and there probably never was a time window for creating a viable market either. But if they'd wanted to get into the server ARM market, they would have had the expertise in-house, there was no need to buy out some startup for the team. That their expertise was on CPUs with different microarchitectures, but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). > 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. Right, being in control of your own destiny rather than being tied to a single supplier is a big deal, and that's one example of what I meant by the strategic reasons. Having more leverage over Intel and AMD on pricing is another. Making it harder for some customers to move their workloads away (because they're bought into ARM and other companies don't have compelling ARM offerings) is a potential third. Not having to pay Intel's margins is a potential advantage, but requires reaching sufficient scale to offset the costs of running your own CPU team. But for any of this to make sense, they need to successfully move a large proportion of their customers over to ARM. Just having the servers available and nobody using them does nothing. That's exactly the kind of situation where you'd want to subsidize the prices for the ARM servers and build up the customer base. That's the case even if ARM has some intrinsic perf/$ advantage; you'd still want to subsidize it to the point where you're able to saturate your ability to manufacture and install ARM servers.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). Apple is designing their own cores while Amazon is just using ARM Neoverse. And Oracle is offering Ampere instance which IIRC are quite close to Gravirton cost/performance wise.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
If ARM wasn't more efficient for Amazon then they wouldn't be aggressively moving their entire internal AWS infrastructure to gravitons. I've heard from folks in the know there that every single new service big or small internally has to work on graviton and by default is expected to launch on it unless the product goes through hoops to justify x86 and its expense.
- yazaddaruvala 3y ago
  Even in 2021, most of Amazon Retail’s workloads were “serverless” and the entire platform was actively flipping to Graviton one cluster at a time.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    How do you know? Is there a link I could read about this? I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate?
    - PNewling 3y ago
      >I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate? What? AWS spun out of Amazon.com having extra servers/infa after the holiday season rush and pushed for an internal way to monetize their extra compute/storage power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/
      - inemesitaffia 3y ago
        It's a creation myth/legend IIRC
      - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
        I've read that they did use it for some time then stopped. People then took AWS to be "Amazon Scale" despite not being true/misleading.[0] If I'm reading it right, even your own link only says they are using s3 for backing up their database. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415
Iwan-Zotow 3y ago
> IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades you HAVE TO HAVE those CPUs on devs laptops. Otherwise it just won't work. Macs with M1/M2 are pretty much ideal setup to develop for gravitons

by jsnell 3y ago

dangus 3y ago

Ampere 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.

jsnell 3y ago
> 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. Obviously there's no real market for Sparc or POWER in the public cloud, and there probably never was a time window for creating a viable market either. But if they'd wanted to get into the server ARM market, they would have had the expertise in-house, there was no need to buy out some startup for the team. That their expertise was on CPUs with different microarchitectures, but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). > 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. Right, being in control of your own destiny rather than being tied to a single supplier is a big deal, and that's one example of what I meant by the strategic reasons. Having more leverage over Intel and AMD on pricing is another. Making it harder for some customers to move their workloads away (because they're bought into ARM and other companies don't have compelling ARM offerings) is a potential third. Not having to pay Intel's margins is a potential advantage, but requires reaching sufficient scale to offset the costs of running your own CPU team. But for any of this to make sense, they need to successfully move a large proportion of their customers over to ARM. Just having the servers available and nobody using them does nothing. That's exactly the kind of situation where you'd want to subsidize the prices for the ARM servers and build up the customer base. That's the case even if ARM has some intrinsic perf/$ advantage; you'd still want to subsidize it to the point where you're able to saturate your ability to manufacture and install ARM servers.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). Apple is designing their own cores while Amazon is just using ARM Neoverse. And Oracle is offering Ampere instance which IIRC are quite close to Gravirton cost/performance wise.

qbasic_forever 3y ago

If ARM wasn't more efficient for Amazon then they wouldn't be aggressively moving their entire internal AWS infrastructure to gravitons. I've heard from folks in the know there that every single new service big or small internally has to work on graviton and by default is expected to launch on it unless the product goes through hoops to justify x86 and its expense.

yazaddaruvala 3y ago
Even in 2021, most of Amazon Retail’s workloads were “serverless” and the entire platform was actively flipping to Graviton one cluster at a time.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  How do you know? Is there a link I could read about this? I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate?
  - PNewling 3y ago
    >I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate? What? AWS spun out of Amazon.com having extra servers/infa after the holiday season rush and pushed for an internal way to monetize their extra compute/storage power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/
    - inemesitaffia 3y ago
      It's a creation myth/legend IIRC
    - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
      I've read that they did use it for some time then stopped. People then took AWS to be "Amazon Scale" despite not being true/misleading.[0] If I'm reading it right, even your own link only says they are using s3 for backing up their database. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415

Iwan-Zotow 3y ago

> IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades you HAVE TO HAVE those CPUs on devs laptops. Otherwise it just won't work. Macs with M1/M2 are pretty much ideal setup to develop for gravitons