5 ms·

> On the contrary, young people often show up having learned on their super fast Apple SSD or a top of the line gaming machine with NVMe SSD. Yes, this is ofte

by zten 3y ago

> On the contrary, young people often show up having learned on their super fast Apple SSD or a top of the line gaming machine with NVMe SSD. Yes, this is often a big surprise. You can test out some disk-heavy app locally on your laptop and observe decent performance, and then have your day completely ruined when you provision a slice of an NVMe SSD instance type (like, i4i.2xlarge) and discover you're only paying for SATA SSD performance.

seabrookmx 3y ago
This doesn't stop at SSD's. Spin up an E2 VM in Google Cloud and there's a good chance you'll get a nearly 9 year Broadwell architecture chip running your workload!
- bmicraft 3y ago
  What this tells me is that the price of running inefficient cpus seemingly isn't nearly as high as I thought it would or should be (in terms of usd/kWh)
  - seabrookmx 3y ago
    Well they bill you for the instance not for some unit of computation. I'd imagine many users of E2 instances don't realize that they could be getting much much worse performance per vcore than if they picked a different instance type. From Google's perspective, if the hardware is paid for, still reliable, and they can still make money on it, they can put new hardware in new racks rather than replacing the old hardware. This suggests Google's DC's aren't space constrained but I'm not surprised after looking at a few via satellite images!
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      Well not exactly. In my mind the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs. Those would definitely be considered opportunity costs that ought to be avoided.
      - seabrookmx 3y ago
        > the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs I don't think this is true, because the old chips don't use more power outright[1][2][3]. In fact in many cases new chips use more power due to the higher core density. The new chips are way more efficient because they do more work per watt, but like I said in my previous comment you aren't paying for a unit of work. The billing model for the cloud providers is that of a rental: you pay per minute for the instance. There's complexity here like being able to pack more "instances" (VM's) onto a physical host with the higher core count machines, but simply saying the new hardware is cheaper to run I don't think is clear cut. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms#intel_processors https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms#intel_pr... [2]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/93792/intel-xeon-processor-e78880-v4-55m-cache-2-20-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/93792/i... [3]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231746/intel-xeon-platinum-8480-processor-105m-cache-2-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231746/...
        bmicraft 3y ago
        True, although they could very well do upgrades on the kind of VPS' where they were already oversubscribed. If you're not paying for physical cores I don't think that argument works.
        seabrookmx 3y ago
        Sure but my comment was about Google's E2 instances specifically, which are billed this way. For Cloud Run or the Google Services they host, I agree it would be odd for them to use old chips given the inefficiency.

by zten 3y ago

seabrookmx 3y ago

This doesn't stop at SSD's. Spin up an E2 VM in Google Cloud and there's a good chance you'll get a nearly 9 year Broadwell architecture chip running your workload!

bmicraft 3y ago
What this tells me is that the price of running inefficient cpus seemingly isn't nearly as high as I thought it would or should be (in terms of usd/kWh)
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  Well they bill you for the instance not for some unit of computation. I'd imagine many users of E2 instances don't realize that they could be getting much much worse performance per vcore than if they picked a different instance type. From Google's perspective, if the hardware is paid for, still reliable, and they can still make money on it, they can put new hardware in new racks rather than replacing the old hardware. This suggests Google's DC's aren't space constrained but I'm not surprised after looking at a few via satellite images!
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Well not exactly. In my mind the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs. Those would definitely be considered opportunity costs that ought to be avoided.
    - seabrookmx 3y ago
      > the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs I don't think this is true, because the old chips don't use more power outright[1][2][3]. In fact in many cases new chips use more power due to the higher core density. The new chips are way more efficient because they do more work per watt, but like I said in my previous comment you aren't paying for a unit of work. The billing model for the cloud providers is that of a rental: you pay per minute for the instance. There's complexity here like being able to pack more "instances" (VM's) onto a physical host with the higher core count machines, but simply saying the new hardware is cheaper to run I don't think is clear cut. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms#intel_processors https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms#intel_pr... [2]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/93792/intel-xeon-processor-e78880-v4-55m-cache-2-20-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/93792/i... [3]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231746/intel-xeon-platinum-8480-processor-105m-cache-2-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231746/...
      - bmicraft 3y ago
        True, although they could very well do upgrades on the kind of VPS' where they were already oversubscribed. If you're not paying for physical cores I don't think that argument works.
        seabrookmx 3y ago
        Sure but my comment was about Google's E2 instances specifically, which are billed this way. For Cloud Run or the Google Services they host, I agree it would be odd for them to use old chips given the inefficiency.