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Making one's own processor design must be the new "every BigCo needs its own proprietary typeface" from yesteryear. Are we to believe that Amazon's workload is
by stackghost 2y ago
Making one's own processor design must be the new "every BigCo needs its own proprietary typeface" from yesteryear.
Are we to believe that Amazon's workload is so unique that an existing design can't fit the bill?
This is just a vanity exercise.
- wmf 2y agoIt's not vanity; the purpose is to reduce cost. "Your margin is my opportunity."
- tracerbulletx 2y agoI think you are vastly underestimating the benefits of optimizing specifically for the existing workloads at the scale of AWS.
- stackghost 2y agoWhat can graviton do that, e.g. POWER cannot?
- barkingcat 2y agoIt's not what POWER cannot, but about what graviton can CUT OUT and SPECIALIZE in while still being able to do what AWS wants. POWER from this perspective, does way too much. It's too much chip for AWS's needs, and a big waste of money. That's what optimization means! You get the smallest/ simplest/cheapest thing that does exactly what you want, and ignore the big bad "do everything" chips that go for megabucks. Then you can devote chip transistor count toward the instructions you want, and ditch all the dead weight that comes with a traditional chip like power, that tries to make a balanced general purpose cpu. This results in a chip that isn't good for anything but the specific need, but it's super cost effective and higher performing.
- Sakos 2y agoAlso likely far more power and heat efficient.
- my123 2y agoPower is not cost-competitive at all to mainstream x86 chips. And stopped being so quite a long time ago.
- ensignavenger 2y agoAmazon has been making custom chips for a while now, this isn't a new trend for them.
- WalterBright 2y agoAmazon is so heavily reliant on the performance of their server farms that even a 1% improvement is worth a vast amount of money.
- almostgotcaught 2y ago> This is just a vanity exercise. Lol graviton has been in production with fantastic margins for like 7 years. Me thinks maybe you don't know as much as you think you do.
- Hikikomori 2y agoIt's not new, graviton that you can use yourself is on the 4th generation. And they've used it to accelerate networking and storage long before that. Most managed services already run on it as well. It's cheaper and faster.
- LunaSea 2y agoGraviton cores are definitely not faster. The core frequencies are too low for heavy usage and I suspect that the caches are too small as well. You can easily benchmark this by comparing the Graviton variants with the Intel specific instances. Graviton 4 has also not been made available for EC2 and RDS instance types in most regions two years after release. My guess is that they are unable to scale production.
- otterley 2y agoGraviton 4 was just GAed 3 months ago. You need to run actual workloads that fully utilize all cores and not benchmarks to understand the value of Graviton. People don’t run benchmarks in production; they run real business applications. Graviton is optimized for horizontal scale, not straight line single core performance.