
Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS - ChuckMcM
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-graviton2-powered-general-purpose-compute-optimized-memory-optimized-ec2-instances/?sc_channel=sm&sc_campaign=launch_reInvent&sc_publisher=TWITTER&sc_country=Global&sc_outcome=awareness&trk=AWS_reInvent_2019_launch__TWITTER&sc_content=AWS_reInvent_2019_launch_&linkId=78151855
======
dman
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will
make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on
multiple fronts.

a. The 10nm process fiasco

b. Missing the chiplet concept

c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was
server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used
making it extremely hard to reason about whether it makes sense to use it for
mixed workloads.

d. With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in
the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads

e. ARM eating their lunch in mobile

f. Nvidia eating their lunch with GPGPU

g. Big players are increasingly building accelerators for critical workloads
that offer better power / performance

h. Strong execution from AMD for the first time in over a decade

i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based
languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to
utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set
of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful
for the user.

~~~
jonstewart
Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed
to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC
competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more
transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and
doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose
the power/performance war that came with mobile processors. ARM held on just
long enough in the low margin embedded world to then conquer mobile. Intel was
able to win price/performance through superior fabrication and economies of
scale, but power/performance really does require a superior design.

If Intel recovers, it may need to jettison x86, or offload x86 interpretation
to a secondary unit for desktop processor with it gone from server procs.

This would make me happy because it’s been crushing to think I might go my
entire career/lifetime with little endian processors being the mainstream. :-/

~~~
atq2119
Little endian has nothing to do with CISC vs RISC or x86 though. Everybody is
little endian today.

x86 helped with that historically, certainly, but fundamentally endianness
just doesn't matter most of the time, and when it does, little endian makes
more sense from first principles.

~~~
Reelin
> Everybody is little endian today.

ACKCHYUALLY, PowerPC (POWER9 included) supports both big and little endian.
Software wise, last I checked the Linux kernel, Debian (PPC port), Gentoo,
FreeBSD, and several other major projects supported both. I believe KVM also
supports flipping VM endianness versus the hypervisor.

Acknowledged, of course, that the spirit of what you said is indeed correct -
the majority of systems in active use are little endian.

~~~
my123
ARM too.

[https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-
sof...](https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-
software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-a/downloads)

See: > AArch64 GNU/Linux big-endian target (aarch64_be-linux-gnu)

------
ChuckMcM
This is an interesting twist in the processor wars, here is the #1 cloud
company that is turning its profits in providing cloud services in to
processor R&D to build new CPUs.

This is a much more important announcement than the press is giving it credit
for.

I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because
Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor
compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke
processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like
Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android.

Doing this both takes away Intel's ability to 'gate' what is and isn't a
cellphone processor, and their ability to set the margins they would like.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been designing and building their own server
designs for years. This takes away Intel's ability to gate their choices at
the Server manufacturer. As a result more AMD server processors were deployed
by these three companies than the rest of the market combined.

Now Amazon is taking profits from the AWS service and re-investing them in
bespoke CPUs that are tuned to the workloads they can see customers running on
their infrastructure. As a result they will not only enhance their cost/power
edge over Google, Microsoft, and everyone else, their infrastructure can be
better than anything you can buy in order to run your own workload, locking
you into their service (a moat if you will for keeping you there).

If they succeed, Google and Facebook will follow suit. (I am guessing Google
already is well down this path, knowing them but also knowing their secrecy
about such things)

If you take 50% of the enterprise server market out of Intel's portfolio they
are left fighting for enthusiast/gamer share and AMD is eating their lunch
there.

It is going to be really interesting to watch this play out.

~~~
monocasa
> I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because
> Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin
> processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development
> of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals.
> Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android.

Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through 3GS ran on
Samsung SoCs. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple used their own SoCs. Not
sure how Samsung could be following suit in that case.

Edit: also, Apple was never going to wait around for Intel. Apple is actually
one of the early investors in ARM, back in the early ninties, had used ARM.in
the whole iPod line (as well as the ill fated Newton), and iPhones lined up
with ARMs in mobile TDPs starting to have full MMUs.

~~~
kbenson
At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the
potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then
was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or
accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point
you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a
lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a
differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their
closest competitor).

There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never
provided it.

~~~
monocasa
I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively
used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the
iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel.

Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original
Pentium.

~~~
kbenson
Everyone was waiting for Intel, either to switch ot to know how to respond to
compete.

Inthink if Intel came out with a compelling product, Apple would have
switched. I suspect they invested in ARM because it made sense at the iPod
level, but once you start converging mobile and desktop experiences, there are
major benefits to having the same architecture for both. Just look at how
rampant the ARM MacBook rumors have been for the last few years.

I think the ARM investment by Apple was good _regardless_ of whether they
wanted to switch to Intel for higher end mobile, so I don't see it as evidence
as to why they didn't want to.

~~~
monocasa
They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the
original Pentium.

Nobody was waiting for Intel to get into the cellphone market. The TDP of
Intel chips just never made sense, and it was clear that this was because they
just didn't institutionally care about that market segment in a real way.

Maybe pundits were waiting, but nobody serious.

Edit: and all these ARM desktop rumors are just that, rumors. They have the
ability to ship a competive low to mid end laptop on their own arm chips
today, and aren't. Their wide OoO designs would run beautifully in a
formfactor that isn't thermally throttled so much. IMO they don't want to
switch ISAs and are waiting out the x86_64 patents.

~~~
perl4ever
"They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the
original Pentium."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton)

...I'm not sure it was before the Pentium though, because it appears they both
came out in 1993.

------
devhwrng
The pricing level for the ARM instances should be interesting. If Amazon
prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they could really
drive adoption and lock-in.

~~~
nordsieck
> If Amazon prices them well below their Intel and AMD instance types, they
> could really drive adoption and lock-in.

Adoption? Sure.

Lock-in? Umm...

Most servers run Linux, and most software on Linux is distributed as source.
The same reason that people can easily move to ARM - they can just
recompile/download software for the correct architecture and everything mostly
works - is the same reason they can leave easily.

All the other AWS proprietary APIs: sure. It'd take a stupendous amount of
work for Netflix to migrate away from AWS. But running on ARM isn't really
part of that.

~~~
bastawhiz
> and most software on Linux is distributed as source

Clearly you aren't purchasing much software. If you're one of the (majority
of) large software companies that use precompiled binaries from vendors for
any of the components in your systems, you're at the mercy of which
architectures your vendor(s) support.

~~~
imtringued
Yeah exactly, you're not going to skimp on the CPU by choosing ARM to save
$500 a year when you have software that costs you thousands every single year.
You're going to stick with x86_64 instead of the crappy budget option that
doesn't even run your software.

~~~
asah
Twist: enterprise software goes the way of IBM mainframes, with a small number
of large customers paying crazy prices for compliance and customization, and
everything in the hardware/software stack being 10+x more expensive than its
commodity equivalent.

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

Clouds are migrating to AMD and Amazon kicks back with home grown cores. Ouch.
Chip vendors have to let go of their ISAs, no one cares, as long as you can
run Debian on it.

------
walrus01
Whatever happened with the Qualcomm Centriq ARM based server CPU? It never
became available at any reasonable price in small quantities for software
development/test/prototyping as something you could actually buy an ATX
motherboard + CPU together and install (redhat, centos, debian, freebsd,
whatever) on.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq)

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-
exit-...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-china-
centriq-2400,38223.html)

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-
makes-...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3327214/qualcomm-makes-it-
official-no-more-data-center-chip.html)

~~~
Twirrim
Amazon can afford to go all-in on building their own chips, with a solid goal
of moving (almost?) all their AWS services over to them (I would bet good
money that will become a requirement for services). They're also more forward
thinking and experimental than most companies are, or can afford to be. The
x86 is the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" of CPUs.

This promises to be quite interesting. If Amazon can prove ARM as viable on
their scale, that'll help companies like Qualcomm who were struggling to drum
up attention from the more traditional markets.

~~~
walrus01
Yes, that's great for amazon, but what about everyone else on the planet who
has x86-64 hypervisors and would like to have the option of purchasing a 3rd
choice of CPU which is not Intel or AMD, at a price/performance ratio that is
somewhat competitive with existing options?

~~~
Twirrim
There are other x86-64 CPU manufacturers, but you're making a massive trade
off for performance. Intel and AMD really have polished their stuff until it
shines.

If Amazon can prove ARM can cope with server scale operations, and even
outperform x86-64, you can have a high degree of confidence that other
companies will get in the game. There are many more companies manufacturing
ARM chips than x86-64 (due to licensing agreements, in part)

------
PeterCorless
We just released our test results of the new Graviton2-based M6g server.
Pretty solid numbers. This is a game-changer.

[https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-
server-...](https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-
dominance/)

------
gautamcgoel
I wish individual consumers could go out and buy these processors. Amazon
really has little incentive to sell them - they are not primarily a chip
manufacturing business, and anyways, why give away their hard-fought
competitive advantage? - but damn, it would be cool to stick one of these in a
workstation and watch it fly.

~~~
wmf
I expect Ampere eMAG 2 to be pretty similar to Graviton2, so you can buy that
instead. (Or pretend that you're going to buy it until you see the price.)

~~~
gautamcgoel
Oh, interesting. Is Graviton designed in collaboration with Ampere?

~~~
wmf
No, but one has 64 N1 cores and the other has 80 N1 cores, probably with
similar memory controllers and PCIe as well.

------
pvg
Yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693797)

~~~
sciurus
In case pvg's "yesterday" comment isn't clear, this link is to a previous
discussion of the same story.

~~~
pvg
I also meant the apparent distance to all my troubles was significantly
greater.

~~~
rrss
Looks like they're going to stick around for a while.

------
bluedino
What % of the server cost for Amazon is the CPU? I mean you have memory, disk,
network, power...

~~~
kova12
AWS is running on very thin margins, and every couple precent in extra
productivity could easily mean doubling profits.

~~~
sanxiyn
> AWS is running on very thin margins

Incorrect. Amazon is a public company, and their own report tells us that AWS
margin is 25%, as of 2019 Q3.

------
social_quotient
Are we thinking Intel is Amazon’s next Barnes and Noble?

~~~
derision
AMD already doing that to Intel

~~~
social_quotient
Ya I get it but they are in the chip biz.

I’m always fascinated when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that
core business as an ancillary means to their own core business.

Probably I think another example is Netflix creating its own content. It’s a
streaming company... but now they produce award winning content.

~~~
bdcravens
> when an incumbent gets beat by a company that views that core business as an
> ancillary means to their own core business.

Early on, books sales was Amazon's core business.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
What is "Graviton2" in this context?

There's no Wikipedia page for it, and the regular google search results all
loop back to this AWS announcement.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I am gathering that it's a chip, a CPU chip, seem to be ARM architecture not
intel x86; and is an important chip or will be due to this? I don't know why
though.

~~~
PeterCorless
Here's our take. This is big.

[https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-
server-...](https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-
dominance/)

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I'm still reading between the lines here, which is frustrating and doesn't
reflect well on the journalism; So you say:

"AWS announced in late 2018 the EC2 A1 instances, featuring their own AWS-
manufactured Arm silicon"

...

"AWS during its annual re:Invent conference announced the availability of
their new class of Arm-based servers, the M6g and M6gd instances among others,
based on the Graviton2 processor."

So the Graviton2 is made by Amazon as well? Under licence from ARM, I mean,
like other ARM design chips.

_edit_ Looks like it, yes. Here is the context necessary to understand the
story:

[https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-
computing...](https://www.wired.com/story/new-amazon-chips-cloud-computing/)

[https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-
new-s...](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-amzn-to-release-new-server-
chip%3A-will-it-hurt-intel-2019-12-04)

------
PeterCorless
Related thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714284)

------
kresten
Complexity and cost have cooled my enthusiasm for AWS.

------
rb808
Its interesting but I wouldn't say Graviton2 is likely to succeed.

Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow, which I dont
really understand because phones usually are amazingly quick.

DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC couldn't keep up with Intel in the recent
past either.

Intel CPUs aren't cheap, but they're a fraction of the cost of a server.

All adds up to interesting innovation but not necessarily the future.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Every ARM based PC I've seen has been disappointingly slow,

The only ARM based PCs I've ever seen are the Raspberry Pi and other products
intended to compete with the Pi, and one of the core features of these PCs is
being a complete computer for under $100. Keeping the price low was always the
top priority, not performance.

~~~
PeterCorless
The Graviton2 is about performance. We did tests. This thing blitzes.

[https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-
server-...](https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-
dominance/)

