
A Peek Into Graviton2 - adwn
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/a-peek-into-the-physics-of-graivton2-amazons-neoverse-n1-server-chip-first-impressions
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walrus01
It's unfortunate to see CPU+motherboard platforms that are entirely
unavailable to purchase and own yourself.

There is a real need for people who want to do development/test with on-
premises servers, and then migrate the end product to an AWS or similar
environment. At least with AMD64 you can reliably do this.

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kick
We at Amazon want you to test on Amazon's servers! After all, Jeff Bezos owns
every server on the planet.

Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of
magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're
not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech
companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who
rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the
rage, nowadays!

That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a
dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in
three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡

﹡ _Restrictions may apply. Not valid in the state of California or to
companies registered in Delaware. We reserve the right to change the terms of
the agreement without prior notice._

~~~
throwaway894345
> that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more
> expensive than doing things on-premises

Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually
comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for
compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center
management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison.

My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average
private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.

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TheFiend7
One year of a a1.2xlarge 8vcpu 16gb RAM costs $1782.144 excluding storage. I
could build a pretty decent server with that money that would last easily half
a decade if not longer.

I could double the cores and mem probably too.

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didibus
How much would you charge to buy this machine, rent a space to put it in, pay
for the utilities and rent related to it, set it up, and consequently maintain
it for half a decade? In addition to the principal of purchasing the hardware?

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vbezhenar
Not a lot. Installing Linux is trivial. Server hardware rarely breaks outside
of disks which are trivial to replace as well.

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tatersolid
In the real world: UPS,generators, cooling, BIOS/management card patching, 100
gigabit switches, optics, cabling, monitoring, tamper-proof logging, SEIM,
cameras, physical security, software licenses. Plus maintenance on all that
stuff.

Oh and you need a DR site too, so double it.

And staff up 4x for 24x7 operations and build an orchestration layer yourself.

I’ve done the math in a lot of scenarios, including (especially) staff time.
Running your own _real_ data center doesn’t make long-term financial sense
unless you are in the mid-hundreds of physical servers.

Colo might make a bit more sense for some situations, but there’s a reason so
much is being moved to cloud providers. The people doing it aren’t stupid.

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NikolaeVarius
Shame EPYC2 wasn't included, but extremeley impressive numbers.

Also I haven't used Anandtech in a while, but it hasn't changed much at all
after their redesign a while back. I'm a fan of how it hasn't changed much.
Nice and simple, though a bit more social media stuff that I remember.

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skavi
If you turn off your ad blocker, you’ll see they’ve actually massively
increased the amount and presence of their ads.

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brenden2
I tried to use ARM instances on AWS, and I discovered a lot of things just
don't work. For example, launching an EKS cluster with ARM nodes requires a
bunch of hacks, and you can't really do anything useful with it yet. The
instances are also not properly supported by Terraform.

I'm excited for ARM because of the pressure it will put on Intel, and also
because of the cost savings. However it seems like AWS has a lot of work to do
to make it useful.

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tracker1
Without good support for at least the following:

    
    
        - docker
        - kubernetes
        - go
        - rust
        - python
        - node
        - .net core
        - java
        - C/C++
    

It won't catch on... Not being able to buy one of these systems also has the
issue of platform developers coming up short in terms of adapting tooling for
the above list.

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cesarb
What's required for all these to be supported is just developers being able to
buy 64-bit ARMv8 processors running a standard 64-bit Linux kernel, not
necessarily the exact same processor Amazon has. And the Raspberry Pi 3B is an
inexpensive 64-bit ARMv8 processor which can run a standard 64-bit Linux
kernel. Sure, it's ARMv8.0 instead of ARMv8.2, but as mentioned in the article
software compiled for ARMv8.0 works fine on ARMv8.2.

~~~
tracker1
Okay, I wasn't aware of that... all the same, would be nice to be able to
actually buy one to work against. The list of supported platforms and being
able to develop (near-locally) are what are really needed.

Haven't really looked into it... it's on my todo list to look at cross-
platform builds to target Raspberry Pi devices, will probably setup
containerized cross platform builds for at least node, rust and .net core for
my own use.

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brianolson
Your next AWS instance might be ARM. I'll have to test my specific workload,
but for 40% more compute-per-dollar I'm interested.

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notatoad
If i'm remembering the previous ARM announcements correctly, you probably
already have an ARM instance somewhere in your stack - they were going to be
transitioning a lot of stuff like ELBs over to these processors.

~~~
ksec
Yes they intend to transit all of their Services, as well as SaaS on top of
their ARM instances. Although they said this is going to take up to 5 years or
more ( usual downplay from Amazon as with everything they do ), I bet they
have a much more aggressive schedule.

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bluedino
I've had a disdain for SPEC benchmarks for a long time. It was always what
workstation makers or Apple (PowerPC Apple) used to show how much faster their
chips were than Intel-even though it never really panned out.

Would a more AWS-oriented benchmark suite make more sense? Test Java, run
PHP/Ruby/Python/Node, see how many pages you can serve with Apache/NGINX, run
queries in MariaDB/Postgres, see how much you can stick through Mongo/Redis...

~~~
enitihas
So Techempower style benchmark?

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dnpp123
Those are worst IMHO - when you look at the tricks used by top performers to
look good, it does not reflect real life situation at all.

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fancyfredbot
Intel (and so x86) has had a manufacturing node advantage over most other
processor manufacturers for a long time. They do not have that advantage
currently. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before another instruction
set became competitive.

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gok
"Cost Analysis - An x86 Massacre"

Quite a headline

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traskjd
RISC is good.

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rrss
The article discusses the new synchronization extensions and indicates they
were added in v8.1:

> it means that they also implement the v8.1 ISA which add new instructions
> such as atomic compare-and-set (CAS).

> you should pay very close attention to make sure your software stack is
> compiled against Arm v8.1 or higher (N1 is v8.2).

But my understanding is that the new atomics are in an extension, so just
compiling to v8.1 may not get the new atomics.

Anyone know what the situation here is? What has to happen to get the compiler
to use LSE atomics?

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whalesalad
For those of you considering alternate instance types remember that it it is
important to do scientific benchmarks.

I just completed a us-west to us-east migration for a client because after a
lengthy benchmark session we learned that the instances we really needed for
our specific workload could not be AMD based. I tried a handful of AMD boxes
and sent them through the ringer, but the Intel boxes always came out on top.
The cost of these is significantly lower in us-east, hence the migration.

Not to knock AMD, but in the _presented configuration from AWS_ the
comparative Intel<>AMD instance types vary greatly. There is also no compute-
heavy instance type from AMD at this time (AFAIK please correct me).

For reference our workload is network (outside AWS), Compute and RAM heavy.
The c5.2xlarge seems to be the sweet spot as far as cost/performance.

So if you’re considering Graviton, make sure to design and run some real
benchmarks. For us (in the AMD scenario) things looked real good on paper but
after benchmarking the performance was not there.

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opencl
The compute-focused AMD instances (c5a and c5ad) based on 2nd gen Epyc were
announced as launching "soon" back in November, haven't heard anything about
them since.

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ksec
Which is the question I keep throwing but without an answer. The EPYC 2 was
previewed in early 2019 and I would not be surprised if All three major cloud
provider has had samples since. And it has been 12 months without much action.
AMD's projection of their Server Market growth aren't exactly encouraging
either.

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Tehchops
Those cost-points will be hard to argue with for those who need "good-enough"
performance.

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gautamcgoel
I want to buy one... I doubt Amazon will ever sell Graviton chops directly to
consumers, but the article says the chip is essentially an underclocked
reference design using ARM N1 cores, so other vendors could offer essentially
identical chips.

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ParadisoShlee
I'm looking forward to the next SOC release with ARM 8.4 for the Pointer Auth.

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saagarjha
Pointer authentication is part of ARMv8.3.

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tedunangst
Did AWS lift an embargo this week?

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wmf
They just seem to be slowly onboarding people for m6g.

