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What happens to old&used Graviton 3 chips? At least in the "old days" there was ( still is ) a secondary market for used server parts.. Don't know how compani

What happens to old&used Graviton 3 chips? At least in the "old days" there was ( still is ) a secondary market for used server parts.. Don't know how companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google would frame a question like this so their "green" narratives wouldn't be hurt but I'm sure they'll do an excellent job.

rstupek 3y ago
They'll continue to run in their datacenter since they're still basically brand new?
baz00 3y ago
They're still running prehistoric Intel Xeons. I'm sure they'll just rot slowly until the instances fail.
- jamesfinlayson 3y ago
  This - I've been seeing recent Fargate workloads mysteriously scaling due to high CPU even though there's no traffic. I started logging the CPU as part of task start-up and I've seen five year old Xeons running my workloads.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    5 years aint too bad, on google their standard n1 class still runs Haswell in some cases which came out 10+ years ago
    - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
      Ouch. Possibly some are older - there were a few processor names that I couldn't find any release date for.
      - dilyevsky 3y ago
        I ran cpu benches there a while ago and it actually performed better wrt single core performance than the newer shit so not all bad
      - imglorp 3y ago
        Who cares, if it's priced appropriately? If I just need a generic x86 t2.nano or whatever, why not? They will run it til the card dies, chuck it in the bin when it does, and until then they can pass some of the savings to users hopefully, win win?
        HPsquared 3y ago
        Not great for energy efficiency, I guess. They might eventually dispose of them if running costs are too high compared to more modern chips.
        jamesfinlayson 3y ago
        The price is the same though, regardless of what I'm getting, and I wouldn't care, except in my non-prod environments everything runs fine on some class of processor, while on my prod environment things didn't run fine and my cluster was maxed out because it was running on some old processor. I know that notionally it can and will run on different hardware in different environments, but if I can run a certain workload (idling at 10% in one environment), I expect to be able to do the same in another environment.
threeseed 3y ago
As a user you don't get much visibility into the specs of managed services e.g. DynamoDB. So that's an obvious home for the chips that are no longer available to users.
asperous 3y ago
If you haven't used aws a lot then you might not know this but the old instance types stick around and you can still use them, especially as "spot" which lets you bid for server time. I had a science project which was cpu bound and it turns out because people bid based on the performance, the old chips end up costing the same in terms of cpu work done/$ (older chips cost less per hr but do less). aws though was by far the most expensive so switching to like oracle with their ampere arm was a lot cheaper for me.
discodave 3y ago
They just... don't retire them? The most expensive thing in a DC is the chips, so it's worth it to just build more datacenter space and keep the old ones around. In 2019, before I left the EC2 Networking / VPC team, we were using M3 instances for our internal services... those machines were probably installed in 2013 or 2014, making them over 5 years old. With the slowdown in Moore's law and chip speeds, I'd wager that team is still using those M3s now. Eventually the machines actually start failing, so they need to be retired, but a large portion of machines likely make it to 10 years.
- temp0826 3y ago
  They for sure can find a use internally for them. Hat-tip to the less-shiny teams like glacier that have to endlessly put out fires on dilapidated old s3 compute/array handmedowns.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  Isn't the most expensive thing power and cooling? IE. if you replace the 5 year old Xeons with new ultra-efficient ARM chips, wouldn't that save you more power and cooling over x amount of time? Genuine question.
  - kaliszad 3y ago
    According to James Hamilton who is a distinguished engineer at AWS no: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center-costs/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-cente... and https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/annual-fully-burdened-cost-of-power/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/annual-fully-burde... And you can watch him say it too: https://youtu.be/kHW-ayt_Urk?si=DKyw0-Pk-dhU5zFG&t=323 https://youtu.be/kHW-ayt_Urk?si=DKyw0-Pk-dhU5zFG&t=323
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      The first link refers to "servers" - not "CPUs". I assume "servers" contains everything server hardware related, not just the CPU.
whalesalad 3y ago
I can't wait to find old surplus custom ARM silicon from this period at the recycler or on eBay. As a kid I always wanted one of those yellow google search appliances and now you can find them everywhere being used as like lawn ornaments.
cjsplat 3y ago
Depending on the numbers involved, previous generation hardware can waterfall to infrastructure apps that are throughput based. Things accessed through network APIs and billed per op or in aggregate. Distributed file systems, databases, even build and regression suite systems. Another key point is that older generations of servers for full custom cloud environments tend to co-evolve with their environments. The amount of power and cooling for a rack may not support a modern deployment. Especially if a generation lasts 6 years. You might be able to cascade gen N+1 to N, but N+6 may require a full retrofit. A 6 year old data center that is partially filled as individual servers fail may justify waiting for N+7 or even 8 to cover the cost of the downtime and retrofit. There is a reason Google announced that they are depreciating servers over 6 years and Meta is at 5 years, vs the old accounting standard of 3 years. Then of course there is a secondary market for memory and standard PCI cards, but the market for 6 year old tech is mainly spares, so it is unlikely to absorb the full size of the N-6 year data center build. If you are considering a refurb style resale market for 6 year old tech, it is often the case that the performance per dollar is a non-starter because of the amount of power the older tech consumes.
aseipp 3y ago
They don't sell these. They reuse them and perform maintenance on them until their last breath and part them out once they die. Hyperscalers design their own datacenter "SKUs" for storage/compute, all the way from power delivery to networking to chassis. These servers are going to be heavily customized and it's unlikely that even if they fit normal form factors that they will work in the same way as COTS devices or things you would buy from Supermicro. You could possibly make it work. If they sold them. But they don't, and if you're in the market for that stuff, Supermicro will just design it for you anyway, because presumably you have actual money. And the reality is they're probably either break even or greener doing it this way, as opposed to washing their hands of it and selling servers on Ebay so they can eventually get throw in landfills wholesale by nerds once their startups fail or they get bored of them. Just because you stick your head in the sand doesn't mean it doesn't end up in a landfill.
- stingraycharles 3y ago
  I haven’t heard about CPUs failing that often, though. Usually it’s some other part of the server that dies, like the motherboard. In that light, the grandparent’s question is still valid — normally these servers that “died” would be torn apart and the non-broken parts refurbished and resold on the aftermarket. Is AWS doing that?
  - aseipp 3y ago
    No, but I spat out a vague answer rather quickly and was too flippant ("maybe you could do something"), so it's a fair question. Realistically, even the motherboard design, including landing pad on the PCB and boot sequence of the chip, from the root of trust to initial firmware bringup, is going to be custom on systems like Graviton4. For example, these use the Nitro system, which exists as hardware, and it is a key point of the whole design. And AWS designs their services to even resist some level of operator compromise, e.g. an operator trying to exfiltrate secrets from the Nitro system, so the amount of people who can exert influence there is extremely limited. Individual parts like the CPU are as good as useless without the chassis (and power supply, and attached switch equipment) they belong to. Even if you had the whole thing, you might very well not be able to do anything with it, making it as good as a brick. Even if Nitro was out of the picture or whatever, and you just had the raw package -- it's not like you can really make a motherboard magically from thin air for these devices based on just the CPU pinout, and the tolerances just for power delivery and memory buses are pretty tight, not to mention a gazillion other things. More broadly, designing compute that is used purely in-house versus large-scale high-volume COTS designs, through e.g. OEM partners, is literally a difference of years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Support, documentation, supply chain relationships, etc. These take a lot of money to do right, and when you buy servers, part of the purchase goes to those departments, to fund them. Most places are better off just talking to Supermicro if they actually need servers, for that reason. But hyperscalers literally save ridiculous amounts of money by doing it themselves and not doing the other things Supermicro does, like OEM work, support, and NRE on generalist designs that are useful outside to third parties.

rstupek 3y ago

They'll continue to run in their datacenter since they're still basically brand new?

baz00 3y ago

They're still running prehistoric Intel Xeons. I'm sure they'll just rot slowly until the instances fail.

jamesfinlayson 3y ago
This - I've been seeing recent Fargate workloads mysteriously scaling due to high CPU even though there's no traffic. I started logging the CPU as part of task start-up and I've seen five year old Xeons running my workloads.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  5 years aint too bad, on google their standard n1 class still runs Haswell in some cases which came out 10+ years ago
  - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
    Ouch. Possibly some are older - there were a few processor names that I couldn't find any release date for.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      I ran cpu benches there a while ago and it actually performed better wrt single core performance than the newer shit so not all bad
    - imglorp 3y ago
      Who cares, if it's priced appropriately? If I just need a generic x86 t2.nano or whatever, why not? They will run it til the card dies, chuck it in the bin when it does, and until then they can pass some of the savings to users hopefully, win win?
      - HPsquared 3y ago
        Not great for energy efficiency, I guess. They might eventually dispose of them if running costs are too high compared to more modern chips.
      - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
        The price is the same though, regardless of what I'm getting, and I wouldn't care, except in my non-prod environments everything runs fine on some class of processor, while on my prod environment things didn't run fine and my cluster was maxed out because it was running on some old processor. I know that notionally it can and will run on different hardware in different environments, but if I can run a certain workload (idling at 10% in one environment), I expect to be able to do the same in another environment.

threeseed 3y ago

As a user you don't get much visibility into the specs of managed services e.g. DynamoDB. So that's an obvious home for the chips that are no longer available to users.

asperous 3y ago

If you haven't used aws a lot then you might not know this but the old instance types stick around and you can still use them, especially as "spot" which lets you bid for server time. I had a science project which was cpu bound and it turns out because people bid based on the performance, the old chips end up costing the same in terms of cpu work done/$ (older chips cost less per hr but do less). aws though was by far the most expensive so switching to like oracle with their ampere arm was a lot cheaper for me.

discodave 3y ago

They just... don't retire them? The most expensive thing in a DC is the chips, so it's worth it to just build more datacenter space and keep the old ones around. In 2019, before I left the EC2 Networking / VPC team, we were using M3 instances for our internal services... those machines were probably installed in 2013 or 2014, making them over 5 years old. With the slowdown in Moore's law and chip speeds, I'd wager that team is still using those M3s now. Eventually the machines actually start failing, so they need to be retired, but a large portion of machines likely make it to 10 years.

temp0826 3y ago
They for sure can find a use internally for them. Hat-tip to the less-shiny teams like glacier that have to endlessly put out fires on dilapidated old s3 compute/array handmedowns.
aurareturn 3y ago
Isn't the most expensive thing power and cooling? IE. if you replace the 5 year old Xeons with new ultra-efficient ARM chips, wouldn't that save you more power and cooling over x amount of time? Genuine question.
- kaliszad 3y ago
  According to James Hamilton who is a distinguished engineer at AWS no: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center-costs/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-cente... and https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/annual-fully-burdened-cost-of-power/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/annual-fully-burde... And you can watch him say it too: https://youtu.be/kHW-ayt_Urk?si=DKyw0-Pk-dhU5zFG&t=323 https://youtu.be/kHW-ayt_Urk?si=DKyw0-Pk-dhU5zFG&t=323
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    The first link refers to "servers" - not "CPUs". I assume "servers" contains everything server hardware related, not just the CPU.

whalesalad 3y ago

I can't wait to find old surplus custom ARM silicon from this period at the recycler or on eBay. As a kid I always wanted one of those yellow google search appliances and now you can find them everywhere being used as like lawn ornaments.

cjsplat 3y ago

Depending on the numbers involved, previous generation hardware can waterfall to infrastructure apps that are throughput based. Things accessed through network APIs and billed per op or in aggregate. Distributed file systems, databases, even build and regression suite systems. Another key point is that older generations of servers for full custom cloud environments tend to co-evolve with their environments. The amount of power and cooling for a rack may not support a modern deployment. Especially if a generation lasts 6 years. You might be able to cascade gen N+1 to N, but N+6 may require a full retrofit. A 6 year old data center that is partially filled as individual servers fail may justify waiting for N+7 or even 8 to cover the cost of the downtime and retrofit. There is a reason Google announced that they are depreciating servers over 6 years and Meta is at 5 years, vs the old accounting standard of 3 years. Then of course there is a secondary market for memory and standard PCI cards, but the market for 6 year old tech is mainly spares, so it is unlikely to absorb the full size of the N-6 year data center build. If you are considering a refurb style resale market for 6 year old tech, it is often the case that the performance per dollar is a non-starter because of the amount of power the older tech consumes.

aseipp 3y ago

They don't sell these. They reuse them and perform maintenance on them until their last breath and part them out once they die. Hyperscalers design their own datacenter "SKUs" for storage/compute, all the way from power delivery to networking to chassis. These servers are going to be heavily customized and it's unlikely that even if they fit normal form factors that they will work in the same way as COTS devices or things you would buy from Supermicro. You could possibly make it work. If they sold them. But they don't, and if you're in the market for that stuff, Supermicro will just design it for you anyway, because presumably you have actual money. And the reality is they're probably either break even or greener doing it this way, as opposed to washing their hands of it and selling servers on Ebay so they can eventually get throw in landfills wholesale by nerds once their startups fail or they get bored of them. Just because you stick your head in the sand doesn't mean it doesn't end up in a landfill.

stingraycharles 3y ago
I haven’t heard about CPUs failing that often, though. Usually it’s some other part of the server that dies, like the motherboard. In that light, the grandparent’s question is still valid — normally these servers that “died” would be torn apart and the non-broken parts refurbished and resold on the aftermarket. Is AWS doing that?
- aseipp 3y ago
  No, but I spat out a vague answer rather quickly and was too flippant ("maybe you could do something"), so it's a fair question. Realistically, even the motherboard design, including landing pad on the PCB and boot sequence of the chip, from the root of trust to initial firmware bringup, is going to be custom on systems like Graviton4. For example, these use the Nitro system, which exists as hardware, and it is a key point of the whole design. And AWS designs their services to even resist some level of operator compromise, e.g. an operator trying to exfiltrate secrets from the Nitro system, so the amount of people who can exert influence there is extremely limited. Individual parts like the CPU are as good as useless without the chassis (and power supply, and attached switch equipment) they belong to. Even if you had the whole thing, you might very well not be able to do anything with it, making it as good as a brick. Even if Nitro was out of the picture or whatever, and you just had the raw package -- it's not like you can really make a motherboard magically from thin air for these devices based on just the CPU pinout, and the tolerances just for power delivery and memory buses are pretty tight, not to mention a gazillion other things. More broadly, designing compute that is used purely in-house versus large-scale high-volume COTS designs, through e.g. OEM partners, is literally a difference of years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Support, documentation, supply chain relationships, etc. These take a lot of money to do right, and when you buy servers, part of the purchase goes to those departments, to fund them. Most places are better off just talking to Supermicro if they actually need servers, for that reason. But hyperscalers literally save ridiculous amounts of money by doing it themselves and not doing the other things Supermicro does, like OEM work, support, and NRE on generalist designs that are useful outside to third parties.