>Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.
It was both AMD and ARM.
There are many work loads that G2 offer immediate cost / performance advantage. AWS charges per vCPU, which is one thread on Intel/AMD and one Core on ARM. So you get ~30% performance improvement along with a ~30% lower cost for using ARM Graviton Series. Most of them have reported a total of 50% reduction in cost. For those that have hundreds if not thousands of EC2 running which fits that workload advantage, this is too much saving to pass on.
There are many SaaS running on EC2 that has mentioned their success on twitter and various other places.
Worth pointing out, this is with Amazon installing as many as they get from TSMC.
A few months ago on HN I wrote [1] about how half of the Intel DC market will be gone in a few years time.
Edit: Another point worth mentioning, this is as much of a threat to Medium and Smaller Size Cloud like Linode and DO where they dont have access to ARM (Yet). And even when they get it Amazon have the cost advantage of building their own instead of buying from a company ( Ampere ).
Linode and DO could always offer a physical x86 core instead of a virtual SMT core. It would cut into margins somewhat, but maybe Intel and AMD would be more willing to discount when they have to play defense. I think one problem for the x86 guys is that because the demand for chips far exceeds supply, they’re still doing “fine” or even “well” right now. So the threat from ARM may still be perceived on mostly an intellectual level instead of provoking the necessary visceral survival response.
I believe Intel couldn't have imagined with what ease their biggest customers can turn into their biggest competitors overnight.
Even a decade ago that would've been unthinkable, but today, making a cookiecutter SoC is relatively easy because nearly everything can be taken off the shelf.
Production costs though.... sub-10nm mask set costs completely rule out anything resembling a startup competing in this area.
I think 65nm was the last golden opportunity to jump on the departing train. It was still posible to ship a cookie cutter chip under $1m, now... no way.
Now, Semi industry is basically Airbus vs. Boeing.
Startups can absolutely compete here. There is sufficient capital to fund chip design (integration) and it is relatively low risk. We are going to see a huge number of Arm and RISC-V solutions on the market 14 months from now.
A few RISC-V SBCs are already on the market. I suspect RISC-V will come to dominate the IoT/Edge space in the next few years before graduating to other market segments.
IoT/Edge deployments are less standardised than other computing workloads. Developers and integrators in this area already expect to deal with a lot of bother when working with a new chips. Also, the margin on these devices is usually razor thin, so the potential savings from not paying ARM licensing fees would be more appreciated.
Finally, RISC-V's modular approach allows for a greater level of flexibility and innovation, which will allow manufacturers to further differentiate and gain a competitive advantage. This is especially relevant for IoT/Edge solutions where thermal and power budgets are heavily constrained.
Ampere basically started as a re-labeled XGene from Applied Micro which started back in 40nm days. And they came with quite some cash to start with: their backer is Carlyle Group, the biggest LBO shop in the world.
Nuvia basically never intended to really compete Intel, or AMD heads on. Their $30m stash would've been just enough for a single "leap of faith" tapeout on a generation old node, and a year of life support after.
They were aiming for a quick sell from the start too.
Depends on your definition of startup I guess. Certainly seems to be enough capital available.
I definitely don't agree with premise that it's now Boeing vs Airbus now (certainly less so than it was a few years ago when x86 was the only game in town).
Do you actually know how much a sub-10nm mask set costs? There’s a lot of speculation from people who don’t have access to those numbers. Those who do are bound by NDAs.
I do hear figures in single megabucks for relatively small tapeouts.
Back in 65nm, 40nm days, big tapeouts were already costing in high 6 figure digits in masks.
And... masks are not the most expensive items on the signoff costs these days.
Specialist verification, outsourced synthesis, layout, analog, physical, test, and other specialist services will easily cost more than the maskset for <40nm.
I would not be surprised if tier 1 fabless already spend $10m+ per design just on them.
You are absolutely correct that design costs swamp mask costs by far. For 7 nm, it costs more than $271 million for design alone (EDA, verification, synthesis, layout, sign-off, etc) [1], and that’s a cheaper one. Industry reports say $650-810 million for a big 5 nm chip.
They're the cheapest EC2 instance type, so they're very attractive to small scale deployments like side projects, personal sites etc. (basically anything that can run on one or two small nodes) where budget is a major concern. The t4g.micro is in the free tier as well, so that'll help.
I host a few very low traffic sites & I'm in the process of switching from a basic DO Droplet to a pair of low-end Gravitons. Will save me money and give better peak performance for my workloads.
> switching from a basic DO Droplet to a pair of low-end Gravitons. Will save me money and give better peak performance for my workloads.
I'm having trouble figuring this out - a t4g.micro is $6/month, before any storage or data transfer costs. The roughly equivalent DO offering is $5/month, inclusive of 25GB SSD and 1TB transfer. Even with a reserve instance discount and significantly less than 1TB outbound transfer, DO seems likely to be cheaper.
Maybe, but it would take a _lot_ of people moving small deployments (where by definition the savings would be small especially relative to the fixed costs of getting to work on Arm) in a relatively short space of time to have this impact - so I'm sceptical (and if it is then it must be very easy to move to Arm - which I'm also sceptical of).
More likely some very big customers (peer comment mentions Twitter) moving to Graviton2 for cost savings.
Graviton might be the top and/or default choice in their management console when you create an EC2 instance. That would swing things pretty quickly for all the free tier folks.
Yes...edited my edit. I'm pretty sure there was no radio button for some time, you would have had to scroll into other choices to get a Graviton instance.
The company I work for has migrated hundreds of heavily-utilised Elasticsearch and Storm nodes to Graviton. No performance issues, pure cost saving. We’re working on the rest of our systems now. We’re going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years.
"instance additions" also doesn't take instance size/performance into account. If ARM-based instances are overall smaller, that'd allow more of them, distorting the numbers...
Percentage of compute power would be cool to know here.
I wouldn't be surprised if AWS is using Graviton2 pretty heavily for internal processes as well, stuff like control planes for the major services like S3, SQS, SNS, etc...
I know many users. Basically any non-x86 workload that cost sensitive can benefit from moving to arm instances. Database instances are good candidates, big data workloads as well.
> 49% of AWS EC2 instance additions in 2020 are based on Graviton2
Surprised at this level of Graviton2 adoption in AWS at this stage. Any clues as to who is using these instances?
Edit: Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.