
EC2 Instances Powered by Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors - mcrute
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-instances-a1-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton-processors/
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jchw
Very cool. As others point out, it does seem a bit expensive, but I do find it
impressive that AWS has added AMD and ARM offerings in such a short period.
Forgetting the idea of using ARM servers purely for the potential cost
savings, I feel this could be a boon to those wanting to run ARM CI builds on
actual hardware instead of Qemu.

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talawahdotnet
Very interesting. Looking forward to benchmarking these for NodeJS API
workloads. Does anybody with experience running node on ARM have any
advice/warnings?

~~~
jon_masters
It all just works well. I've been actually running Node on these instances for
a while and it's awesome.

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tanilama
Wow...this is actually huge. Finally a big player for ARM based server!

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nl
Amazon shipping their own CPUs (which are only available on their cloud) and
Google shipping their own TPUs (which are only available on their cloud).

TPUs are already a better deal than GPUs for training many models. These CPUs
don't seem to have a similar niche yet, but who knows what else they have
ready to switch on.

The next ten years are going to be really interesting in the hardware space.

~~~
StillBored
Well its true about the TPU's, but you can find similar A72 based servers from
other vendors if you try hard enough...

[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hisilicon/hi16xx/hi1616](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hisilicon/hi16xx/hi1616)

The ThunderX2 based machines aren't A72's but a probably easier to source and
are basically in the same conceptual ballpark.

~~~
nl
Sure, they are Arm cores, but who knows what else they have on them.

Arm has a bunch of extensions[1][2] which would be really useful on these in
some circumstances. And that is ignoring the "custom silicon" that Amazon
claims to have.

[1] [https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/machine-
learning...](https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/machine-learning/arm-
ml-processor)

[2] [https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-project-
trillium-842770...](https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-project-
trillium-842770/)

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cntlzw
For someone who doesn't know much about ARM vs Intel/AMD. What is the use case
here? If both run Linux what is the difference?

~~~
lgbr
At the current point in time, this is probably limited to ARM-specific
workloads (such as if I need to run ARM binaries, or generate ARM binaries
without the hassle of cross-compiling).

The long term, however, is where things start to get interesting. I suspect
that by the second generation we're going to see ARM servers able to deliver a
better price-per-core (and perhaps therefore price for computing performance)
than the x86 alternatives. This will be particularly beneficial for
applications which require a lot of CPU power and are highly parallelizable.
Picture a workload that can take advantage of 64 cores, with ARM you can get
this many cores for a lot less cost than x86.

~~~
rbranson
These instances already deliver better cost efficiency. The a1 instances are
within 5% of the performance of similar c5 instances, but are 40% (!!!)
cheaper.

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azinman2
Amazon-made CPUs now available in EC2 instances? I hope someone at Intel is
paying attention....

~~~
baybal2
Surely they do, all kinds of "cloud" companies were their favourite milking
cows in the last decade. I believe Amazon's primary motivation for going as
far as buying an own chip company was to, at least, send Intel a signal "would
you lower the price tag?"

That "cloud" industry is approaching the point of market being fully served,
and everybody starting to focus on price. Amazon surely wants to be at least
prepared for that, if not having a plan to undercut everybody early on ARM
based hosting.

~~~
kelp
From the perspective of capabilities, I think you’re right, the market is
nearly fully served. From usability, I think we still have a long ways to go.

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dwyerm
I'm still curious what the real use-cases are going to be for these platforms.
I think many people see "ARM in AWS" and think they're going to get an array
of super-inexpensive Raspberry Pies with Amazon's network, power, storage and
APIs behind them.

But Amazon doesn't appear to be aiming for those users with this product. T3s
are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case.

I suspect the real users of this platform are going to be using them for
development and testing for mobile platforms.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-
> case.

Cheaper? Yes. Faster? Only in bursts.

The advantage of the A1 instances is you get a full CPU core that you can run
at 100% usage 24/7 for ~$18/month. A t3.small is ~$15/month, but you can only
use the CPU at 100% for a fraction of the time.

If you're frequently pegging the CPU and so a T3 doesn't work for you, your
cheapest option is a C5 which runs ~$61/month.

A1 fits right in between the two needs.

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gtirloni
This is great news for ARM in general. Hopefully they can offer massive thread
count in the future, even if with less powerful cores.

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dis-sys
Can't wait to see some specs and benchmarks of this new ARM processor! Best
AWS news for me in 2018.

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brad0
Very exciting! I’m curious what type of workloads these will be used for.

Will this be much cheaper than Intel instances?

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orliesaurus
Comparing the large instance (16vCores, 32gib ram) to anything else "large" in
N.Virginia, the price seems more affordable than what was purchase-able until
now

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kerpele
It'll be interesting to benchmark these against existing instance types. Also,
there hasn't really been anything in AWS for low sustained load but these seem
to fit the bill perfectly.

~~~
douglasfshearer
Rick Branson ran a benchmark with Phoronix. a1 is ~2/3 of the cost/performance
of a5. [0]

[0]
[https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1067304265696202752](https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1067304265696202752)

~~~
kerpele
Awesome!

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tromp
"we’ve worked with them to build and release two generations of ASICs (chips,
not shoes)"

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tambourine_man
Does ARM feature hardware assisted virtualization? Like Intel VT instructions?

I’m thinking incredibly cheap ARM instances in the future.

~~~
jon_masters
Yes, Arm does feature hardware virt and it works similarly to other
architectures

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baybal2
I see, Mr. Bezos finally got concerned by hardware makers turning AWS into
their milking cow. Quite a smart move.

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jayonsoftware
2 GB / 1 vCPU about $20. On DO you can get 4 GB / 2 vCPUs plus 80 GB storage
and 4 TB on Transfer for $20. (Same with linode.com, upcloud.com)

~~~
013a
In the same keynote this was announced, they said that one of their regions
has reached nearly 5 Pbps of inter-AZ network capacity. They also poked at
Google for using phrasing like "regions _usually_ have independent cooling and
power control planes". They clarified a common misconception: Regions aren't
single datacenters, nor are AZs single data centers, and at least one of their
AZs (probably a us-east-1 AZ) has fourteen datacenters.

If you want the Cheapest, go to DigitalOcean. AWS is engineering the Best. Why
HN has this obsession with quibbling over a couple dollars while hosting their
hobby projects on the same cloud provider that Epic Games and Netflix pay
hundreds of millions of dollars to for their massive workloads, I'll have no
idea. It's not made for you.

Amazon can get on stage and throw valid infrastructure resiliency complaints
at Google. They can't do the same thing against DigitalOcean or Linode,
because that'd be like Usain Bolt making fun of a toddler's quarter mile time.

~~~
oceanplexian
Amazon could also pick on someone their own size. Oracle's annual revenue is
more than double AWS at 40B a year. If you look at on-prem enterprise IT, or
Azure you'll find competitors much closer to AWS with very high performance,
resilience, and security guarantees. In fact, Azure is growing much faster
than AWS and Microsoft has a huge advantage in many of the industries that AWS
is lagging in.

AWS is a leader in "running a web app at scale". But when it comes to
Healthcare, Finance, Government, Education, Telecommunications, etc, they are
small fish in a big pond.

~~~
adventured
AWS by itself will be the size of Oracle in fiscal 2020. They'll do $24-$25
billion in sales for 2018. Oracle's business hasn't expanded in years: sales
in 2015 were $38b, and that's still their approximate annualized sales figure
today. AWS is ~64% the size of Oracle. In 2019 they'll be 85% the size of
Oracle.

So there you have Oracle with essentially zero growth and a failed cloud
business that is not only running from behind, it's a disaster. Things are so
bad, Oracle has begun trying to hide their cloud numbers when they report.

Simultaneously, Oracle's balance sheet is turning into a toxic wasteland. Net
tangible assets have gone from positive $6 billion to negative $12 billion in
just three quarters. They're now spending the equivalent of ~22% of their net
profit on debt interest alone. Ellison will have to try to turn to another
very large acquisition soon to bail out the ship that is about to sink. As the
large cloud competitors get far larger in the next few years, they're going to
begin not just robbing Oracle of growth but taking their existing business
away. The scale is at a point where for AWS and Azure to double in size again
(guaranteed to happen), Oracle is going to lose big.

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fargo
I was expecting a firearm based processor

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pyabo
Do you Google Employees think that NSA isn't watching what we do? Mmm, it
looks like China is evil so they can't do what USA can

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orliesaurus
Amazon making their own CPUs? Damn. Looks like if you run Python or other
scripted languages you can simply port your code over...Nice!

~~~
tw04
They acquired Annapurna Labs back in 2015 - I'm sure this is based on their
work, they (Annapurna) were already building chips for Synology prior to the
acquisition.

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

~~~
RKearney
It is. They mention it in the second paragraph of the linked article.

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koolba
Does vCPU on the chart refer to a physical ARM core and any clue how they
stack up against a modern x86-64 core?

If they’re significantly cheaper to run at similar perf this is an easy win
for arch agnostic things like bastion servers or purely interpreted scripting
languages.

~~~
_msw_
Hello from the EC2 engineering team!

A vCPU on an A1 instance is a physical Arm core. There is no SMT (multi-
threading) on A1 instances. In my experience on the platform, the performance
is quite good for traditional cloud applications that are built on open source
software, especially given the price. Since the Arm architecture is quite
different than x86, we always recommend testing the performance with your own
applications. There's really no substitute for that.

~~~
koolba
Thanks for the direct response!

Are A1 instances supported as hosts for ECS clusters?

~~~
TheDong
The docker image they release for the on-host agent [0] doesn't seem to have
an arm tag. That seems to point towards it being unlikely.

I'll also point out that most docker images you build/run today are x86 and so
won't run on arm machines anyway.

[0]: [https://hub.docker.com/r/amazon/amazon-ecs-
agent/](https://hub.docker.com/r/amazon/amazon-ecs-agent/)

~~~
justincormack
Most of the official Docker images are now multi arch. We have been using
Packet.net to build the arm images. But there are many images that are not and
some registries don’t support multi arch even.

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turblety
Do hosting companies no longer give you the speed of a processing core? I
couldn't find anywhere that explains how fast 1 of the ARM cores go? Is it
1ghz or 100mhz? Seems like that would be quite important. Seems like 1vCPU is
a bit of an arbitary figure. That could be 1 vCPU that goes at 4ghz but then 2
vCPU's that only go at 1ghz. I feel like there's information missing.

~~~
Keyframe
With AWS, I found this info from tableau recently:

An AWS vCPU is a single hyperthread of a two-thread Intel Xeon core for M5,
M4, C5, C4, R4, and R4 instances. A simple way to think about this is that an
AWS vCPU is equal to half a physical core. Therefore, when choosing an Amazon
EC2 instance size, you should double number of cores you have purchased or
wish to deploy with.

[https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-
us/ts_aws_v...](https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-
us/ts_aws_virtual_machine_selection.htm)

Don't know how true it is, but there's no reason for me not to trust what
Tableau has to say.

~~~
sslalready
It’s true. Also note that you get a physical core for each vCPU with t2.

I’ve benchmarked c5 and t3 against t2 and have found single thread perf to be
better on c5 compared to t2. When loading all vCPUs the performance suffered
on the newer instances (each HT performed worse than a single t2), so you
would get more bang for your buck on t2. YMMV of course.

~~~
blasdel
Yes T2 performs quite admirably! If your CPU-bound workload doesn't use much
memory, smaller sizes of T2 Unlimited can be a much better deal than C4.

T3 gives you both threads of your physical core and commensurably more CPU
credits per hour to utilize them. You may notice that even T3.nano offers 2
vCPUs where T2.small has 1 vCPU.

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ac29
Any idea what ARM cores these are based on? A5x? A7x?

A76 would be pretty interesting...

~~~
sidereal
Looks like A72. Here's the cpuinfo:

    
    
      processor	: 0
      BogoMIPS	: 166.66
      Features	: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid
      CPU implementer	: 0x41
      CPU architecture: 8
      CPU variant	: 0x0
      CPU part	: 0xd08
      CPU revision	: 3

~~~
ac29
Too bad, A72 is the sort of thing found in $49 SBC's these days. For the
price, it would have been nice to see at least A73, but at least its not an
A53.

~~~
wmf
A73 isn't for servers and I don't see any server/embedded SoCs with A75 yet,
so Amazon isn't exactly behind.

~~~
ac29
True, most server ARM processors that come to mind are custom (or at least
semi-custom): Ampere, Centriq, ThunderX2. Trying to map them to A72/73/75/76
is perhaps short sighted since those are primarily smartphone cores - we'll
have to wait and see how they perform in real world tests.

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hamandcheese
On demand pricing starts at roughly $20/month. When they said low cost I was
hoping for something in the ~$5 range.

~~~
ksec
And it doesn't come with any Storage or Network Transfer. You will soon
require a Phd to figure out the cost optimisation on AWS, or simply switch to
DO for a much simpler pricing.

~~~
whitepoplar
I just can't fathom why AWS is so popular given its high mental overhead.
Every other VPS provider is like, "Look! It's a server with local storage and
memory and CPUs. It comes with this much bandwidth and this much storage. If
you pay us you can have it!" AWS: "Hold my beer."

EDIT: I get it, I realize that the value of AWS is in the whole basket of
services you can use, not just EC2, but damn do they make it unpleasant. If
DigitalOcean gets more enterprise-serious and adds more hosted services, AWS
really better watch out.

~~~
dwild
Well there's still an advantage to that flexibility. Sure it's fun for a
random project to have average value to every specs, but some project require
much more RAM than CPU, or much more bandwidth, or the more usual much more
storage. If you need any big amount of storage on Digital Ocean, you need to
take one of their beefy machine, even if you don't need that much RAM or that
much CPU. Sure there is object storage, but that's a whole different storage
system and it doesn't play well with a database server.

When you actually need specific specs at a huge scale, it's not much more
complex to do it over AWS.

~~~
unilynx
for a database server (or for anything that just needs a big filesystem), DO
has block storage, which just looks like an attached hard disk. Works fine
with a small VM.

they also have memory-optimized or cpu-optimized VM choices.

