Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

AMD and Intel Have a Formidable New Foe (Amazon)

posted by martyb on Monday March 23 2020, @07:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the processor-designed-for-AWS-works-very-well-on-AWS dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow420:

AMD and Intel have a formidable new foe but you'll never guess who it is:

Amazon's new Graviton2 CPU has been tested extensively by Andrei Frumusanu from our sister website AnandTech, and the results show this new kid on the block outstrips the incumbents when it comes to performance per dollar.

Graviton2 was tested against two other cloud computing resources offered by Amazon Web Services: the m5a (AMD EPYC 7571) and m5n (Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL Cascade Lake). Andrei found it could offer savings of up to 54%, which he says represents "a massive shakeup for the AWS and EC2 ecosystem."

[...] The chip comes from Annapurna Labs and packs 64 A76 ARM cores - similar to what you can find in a smartphone - with 33MB cache and a high clock speed. Amazon is Annapurna Labs' only customer (as its owner), which means the processor is extremely fine-tuned for AWS workloads.

According to Andrei, unless you're tied to the x86 platform, you'd be "stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances" once they become more widely available for everything from VPN (AWS VPN) to web hosting (AWS Light Sail).

For now, expect AMD's EPYC2 processors to put up a bit of a fight - at least until Graviton3 lands.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
AMD and Intel Have a Formidable New Foe (Amazon) | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 15 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by exaeta on Monday March 23 2020, @08:29PM (2 children)

    by exaeta (6957) on Monday March 23 2020, @08:29PM (#974580) Homepage Journal
    So, Amazon sets the price per CPU cycle. Is it surprising that they made their own CPU cheaper? Unless they start selling this CPU to third parties, the comparison is invalid.
    --
    The Government is a Bird
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 23 2020, @08:52PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday March 23 2020, @08:52PM (#974592)

    So, Amazon sets the price per CPU cycle. Is it surprising that they made their own CPU cheaper?

    Undercutting the competition by 50% when you're already highly profitable is always a surprise. Especially considering their costs are iron, power and personal rather than just iron.

    That being said, keep the global market in perspective: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/163575/china-unicom-activates-500gbps-of-trans-russian-ttk-capacity-to-europe [lowendtalk.com]

    --
    compiling...

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday March 23 2020, @11:23PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday March 23 2020, @11:23PM (#974657) Journal

    Not necessarily. Amazon is hardly the only place you can get ARM processors.