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Amazon's Secret Weapon in Chip Design Is Amazon
- varelse 2y ago[dead]
- rytill 2y agoAWS is so anti-customer with respect to GPUs right now. They have the highest prices of any cloud. What happened to “your margin is my opportunity”? And, as far as I know, customers are unable to allocate a VM with fewer than eight A100, H100, or H200 GPUs. (Please tell me how if I’m wrong.) So, customers are incentivized to use other cloud products for GPUs in the short term. They seem to be heavily invested in their own chips in the medium term.
- hyperliner 2y ago[dead]
- re-thc 2y agoThey're trying to sell you their managed product, i.e. bedrock.
- lpasselin 2y agoMeanwhile, I had a hard time last week getting a machine with 8 gpus from azure.
- alephnerd 2y agoEvery customer of a 3rd party cloud provider is going to have a hard time getting Nvidia GPU compute from 3rd party cloud providers - not only is the amount of GPUs available limited, but Nvidia themselves are trying to spin up their own cloud provider offering, and unsurprisingly don't want to help a competitor.
- mattferderer 2y ago> but Nvidia themselves are trying to spin up their own cloud provider offering, and unsurprisingly don't want to help a competitor I thought Jensen recently said he does not want to offer their own cloud offering. He instead wants to focus on creating ready made solutions for cloud vendors to purchase & re-sell services with.
- alephnerd 2y agoFair point! I think that's a recentish pivot though (past 2-3 years). I vaguely remember that in the late 2010s they were building and testing DGX Cloud as it's own standalone offering, but I might be wrong and confusing some other offerings they were working on.
- electronbeam 2y agoThey typically come physically in 8s as an SXM5 tray. It takes more effort to virtualize SXM5 than individual PCIe cards, so you find availability in 8s in VMs too regardless of provider
- JCM9 2y agoThey seem to be sold out of an extremely popular product and seem to be making good money doing so (per AWS’s results). How’s that “anti-customer?” Also, in case you didn’t get the memo GPUs are hard to come by most places these days.
- ActionHank 2y agoAmazon is not a secret weapon, poison pill maybe? This is a company that is actively shooting itself in the foot on all fronts and by the time they realize it’s gone too far they won’t be able to turn the ship fast enough.
- godzillabrennus 2y agoAmen. I have had so many issues with orders from Amazon recently that they told me I’m on a watch list for returns and could have my account terminated. I’ve been a customer for about 20 years with this account. I’ll be shopping at other retailers now.
- bitexploder 2y agoRemember ~70% of their profit is AWS. The consumer business gives them massive revenues but costs dramatically more to operate.
- CamperBob2 2y agoHave you actually been returning an unusual amount of stuff?
- Spooky23 2y agoThey look at certain categories and punish you for their fraud. I got on the naughty list after returning 4 chromebooks. Each had an issue as a result of Amazon’s shady practices. One was returned, sold as new. The replacement was defective. So I ordered another model. First was damaged in transit. Second was a return that another OEMs charger. I said “fuck this” and went to Best Buy, paid approximately the same price and had an actual, new, working Chromebook for my son.
- bell-cot 2y agoMy bet: Statistically, and adjusted for Amazon's relentless enshittification of the products they sell, he has not done that. But since Amazon's optimal strategy - short-term - is to just keep dialing up their shit, and dialing down their tolerance for people returning their shit...
- OrvalWintermute 2y agoI've been through 4 different calls with Amazon's outsourced to India Customer Support, taken high resolution photographs from 20 different angles for their incorrectly shipped product to me which shows they tagged products incorrectly. Will probably take them to Small Claims Court. Worst Customer Support ever. Such a scam. My wife is happy with them though.
- rabbitofdeath 2y agoOK, I know this is a bit off topic, but Prime (as a shopper) and Amazon quality of products is definitely tanking in my opinion. Has anyone had good experience with Walmart+? I've considered switching, but I'm skeptical. Edit: Misspellling ‿
- mindslight 2y agoWhy are you viewing them as mutually exclusive things? Drop Prime (aka Amazon Sunk Cost Fallacy), and just accept that your orders will take a few days longer with their Slow Spiteful Shipping. I don't think the the Walmart sunk cost program even affects the shipping time, which mostly ends up being quicker than Amazon's Spiteful Shipping. Same thing with Target and every other large vendor regardless of whether they're pushing a subscription gimmick or not. Hitting a minimum order amount is really not hard once you've got items you buy regularly from each place.
- jerf 2y agoAmazon's secret weapon is Amazon's own use of chips, if your idea of "secret" is that you wear a blindfold and anything you can't see is therefore "secret". More like "Amazon's Blindlingly Obvious Weapon In Chip Design Is AWS".
- alephnerd 2y agoAll Cloud Providers are working on vertically integrating compute - for example, look at GCP's bet on TPUs and Azure's investment into Cobalt and Maia. The difference is, Amazon's bet on commodified ML Compute infra largely paid off due to a mix of developer advocacy and the fact that there is a large existing market of users somewhat adept with AWS. In fact, it could be a case study of how an incumbent can lose the ball - back in the 2014-18 period Tensorflow was THE framework, and Google absolutely could have used it as a killer app to market then new GCP (and they did try), but Amazon was able to outcompete GCP on both Containerization and Cloud ML Compute because of their strong developer advocacy and training programs. Don't be dismissive about Amazon's historically strong developer advocacy motion. Peak Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, VMWare etc all placed similar bets, and Nvidia has done something similar since the mid-2010s in the ML space. At the end of the day, buyers are somewhat technical. GTM strategy is just as important as technical and product strategy.
- MangoCoffee 2y agoApple's approach is a prime example - why depend on Intel when they're lagging behind? By designing their own chips and partnering with a foundry to manufacture them, Apple can create customized solutions that meet their product's specific requirements, distinguishing themselves from other PC manufacturers that use Intel/AMD chips. Amazon recognizing it as an opportunity to stand out from the competition in the cloud services market by offering its own chips.
- alephnerd 2y ago> why depend on Intel when they're lagging behind? Tbf, Apple transitioned to Samsung by the early 2010s for their SoCs. The MacBook on Apple Silicon was a recent transition after the kinks in the iPad Pro (which is laptop specced) were ironed out. > Amazon recognizing it as an opportunity to stand out from the competition in the cloud services market by offering its own chips Exactly, and evangelizing earlier than other cloud providers.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoAnnapurna had some pretty ok consumer chips before their buy out Ditto for PA Semi, who were bought by Apple. SiFive changed to being an IP provider, is no longer selling chips. It feels sometimes like the PC world is in collapse. No one wants to sell chips any more, it's all for cloud or for appliance-ized phone-lile systems. When someone does come along and starts making new chips, they get bought. I wish the hyperscalers had some interest in keeping a competitive market alive, in supporting independent competition. I respect the desire to have a strong in house team and Graviton 3+ have really been excellent (Nitro is also super interesting deep tech I wish we saw in the world; alas AMD's SeaMicro acquisition took one similar out in the wild super-fabric offering off the table rather than promoted it). But man, the consolidation in chip making has been brutal & it doesn't feel like there's enough folks getting started making cores to keep things healthy. There's some disruption from below with RISC-V starting, but it's been slow & is very down market still (Tenstorrent being the notable exception). The broad ecosystem feels like it needs help, needs new vitality, is ossofying, in large part because of these acquisitions.
- alephnerd 2y ago> It feels sometimes like the PC world is in collapse. No one wants to sell chips any more, it's all for cloud or for appliance-ized phone-lile systems. When someone does come along and starts making new chips, they get bought Alternatively, smartphones are the PC (personal computer) of choice. SoC and mobile chips are themselves near desktop level performance. Heck, Apple's A18 can outcompete the M1 in certain benchmarks, and outcompetes a Kaby Lake Intel i5 (2017-19 period) in most aspects. We are reaching a point where commodity mobile processors have mid-2010s desktop chip level performance but at a fraction of the cost, which opens up plenty of opportunities.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoI agree there's a lot interesting and great about phone chips. And there has been some progress getting some phones running real Linuxes, with upstream kernels & more regular userspaces. There's some cheating too, using hybrid Android drivers bent to be Linux-y. But man it is so irritating to me that there's such tight controls on these chips in every way. So many seem to only be available for large devices makers. There seems to be very narrow segmentation. Ideally one would hope a small SBC with say a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 (SM7675-A), with a single X4 core, would be so interesting as a low cost small board. But instead of the most popular chips on the planet - cellphone chips - being everywhere, there's a whole market of extra special extra old-core embedded chips - the Allwinner and Rockchips and Broadcoms - providing an alternate. One would hope removing display, touchscreen, battery, and case could lower costs, but it's just not done. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21316/qualcomm-intros-snapdragon-7-gen-3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/21316/qualcomm-intros-snapdra... And phones, man, so many are locked locked locked down. Many of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops are locked down - laptops - which can by design install no OS but windows. Highly restricted use seems normal in the ARM world, makes these so much less able to be enjoyed. The other major downside to phones is they have enormously limited io. A single USB 3 port isn't the worst, but it's still a very narrow straw for something like a modern flash drive to squeeze it's data through. Hopefully, again, USB4 improves this, but ideally I'd love some PCIe connectivity and especially multi-port designs (Lenovo has a couple gaming phones with >1 port in some markets, way cool). I agree with the excitement for mobile. But it's also a dark segment, a pinnacle of consumerdom & regression to the mean versus that brief great amazing age of Personal Computer compatible, which has spawned systems both small and massive and mighty, that we have been able to extend & use however we might imagine. Phones returned us to an age of control, where our species is impotent at using the tech we have all around us, phones are infernal devices trapping us, are the spiritual foe of human spirit.
- snvzz 2y agoI am fully expecting a RISC-V Graviton (they might change the name) within two years.