
Coming Soon – Graviton2-Powered General Purpose EC2 Instances - jedberg
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-graviton2-powered-general-purpose-compute-optimized-memory-optimized-ec2-instances/
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johnduhart
I've been extremely skeptical of ARM EC2 instance types getting any sort of
traction, as I don't believe most companies would bother to port their
software to another architecture. This line pointed out something I never
considered:

> Based on these results, we are planning to use these instances to power
> Amazon EMR, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and other AWS
> services.

Amazon running their PaaS services on top of their own silicon is really an
interesting prospect. I wonder how much hardware is allocated to running their
platform services vs. EC2 instances for customers, as there's definitely an
opportunity for Amazon to port these workloads and decrease the dependence on
Intel.

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BenoitP
> as I don't believe most companies would bother to port their software to
> another architecture

For a Java/Node/Python application, this means changing one line in a docker
file, and running preprod/integration tests.

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zten
Python libraries frequently aren't only in Python, and use native bindings.
Node packages less so, but it still happens.

Java might surprise you, too, especially on EMR. I've found math, compression,
and machine learning libraries that reach out to native code using JNI.

~~~
colechristensen
All of the major distribution families support Arm archs and the heavy lifting
for most of the things that reach out to native code have already been ported.

Native libraries are most often used to make boring things faster, use popular
C libraries, and are already ported.

Unless your in-house library is using native bindings for custom code, it very
likely will be a drop-in replacement.

ARM isn't so esoteric these days like it might have been 5-10 years ago.

~~~
zten
Definitely exciting news! For some reason I was picturing that you might have
difficulty building things like xgboost or getting an optimized version of
BLAS, but that doesn't seem to be the case. (the former is supported and the
latter is important enough that ARM ships their own version)

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wmf
They're saying a Neoverse N1 core is ~40% faster than a 3.1 GHz Skylake
thread; that's impressive.

Also note that they've changed the branding from A1 to M6g, making ARM a peer
of Intel and AMD. So their 2020 lineup will probably be:

M6: Intel Ice Lake-SP

M6a: AMD Rome

M6g: ARM Graviton2

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frankchn
Does the Neoverse core have hyperthreading? I know that vCPU threads on the
major cloud providers are hyperthreads instead of real hardware cores.

~~~
_msw_
Disclosure: I work for AWS on EC2 infrastructure (among other things)

No, the Graviton and Graviton2 processors do not have SMT. Each vCPU (or
logical processor, for a bare metal instance) is a core.

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imglorp
I wonder how much of the performance delta is due to the mitigations for the
branch prediction vulnerabilities.

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dsign
I wonder, as an AWS customer, what's the advantage of an ARM instance over a
more traditional AMD64 one?

~~~
cbg0
According to AWS marketing: 20% lower cost and up to 40% higher performance
over Amazon EC2 M5 instances, based on internal testing of workloads.

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derision
*assuming your programs can be ported to ARM

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takeda
Since those are your programs you have source code, so yes, you can port them
to ARM.

The actual question is whether you want to put that effort or not. You'll have
to decide if the savings through instance are worth it or not.

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marban
General question: Who needs all this high-end, niche(?) services that AWS is
cranking out like every week that are presumably even profitable in the long-
term?

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nostrebored
When you consider the volume of customers using the cloud, even a small
percentage of interest can represent huge revenues. Competing over small value
adds can win over a customer from a competitor or make the case for hybrid
cloud.

~~~
marban
Right, but I wonder how many businesses are created based on an 'inspiration'
from new AWS services vs. those who aren't already running similar things and
don't value the created IP as a competitive advantage; thus just move over to
AWS.

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
I was won over to ARM by the raspberry pi. Suddenly I wanted all of my
software to be compatible with ARM. Back when the RPI was new I was definitely
not alone, because when I did find issues with certain python libraries I
usually found the issue opened by another dev — also so it will work on the
RPI!

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matt2000
What does the performance comparison mean on this page? Does it mean a similar
vCPU count A2 instance is ~40% faster than an Intel based M5 one? Or is the
40% improvement mainly through higher core count?

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rmangi
Anybody know the energy usage of the different chips?

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redwood
Is pricing public?

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jakozaur
I wonder why they didn't launch i3 style instances. Would ARM give benefit in
IO heavy workloads?

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colechristensen
AWS did some custom hardware for their i3 style instances which would be a
significant effort to recreate on a difference processor/system architecture.

~~~
_msw_
Disclosure: I work at AWS on EC2 infrastructure

We'll be launching configurations of these Graviton2 powered instances with
local NVMe storage. The largest sizes will have a good bit of local storage,
though not as much as I3. There are some really exciting numbers from
customers building ultra high performance database engines who have early
access. They'll be in the updated CMP322 talk at re:Invent today.

[https://www.portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/sessionDet...](https://www.portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=98895)

