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from the processor-designed-for-AWS-works-very-well-on-AWS dept.
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by exaeta on Monday March 23 2020, @08:29PM (2 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 23 2020, @08:52PM
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
Not necessarily. Amazon is hardly the only place you can get ARM processors.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Monday March 23 2020, @10:11PM (3 children)
1) Can I trust Amazon?
2) Are there blobs and binaries, which precludes securing the system?
3) Is it a good idea to give Amazon any more power than it has already?
Amazon already feels that it deserves 10 billion fucking dollars to grace a city with its presence. This is not a company you want to give ever more power too.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 23 2020, @10:25PM
No
Not for Amazon, no. And anyone else is irrelevant, that CPU is not for sale yet and it may well never be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @10:26PM
Amazon is currently the only company keeping the economy going. Bezos created 100,000 jobs this week. I say it is a great idea to give Amazon more power. Bezos for President in 2024!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @10:44PM
1) The purpose of the CPU is to run AWS, so trusting Amazon is irrelevant. It only matters if you already trust them enough to store your data there and buy AWS servers from them.
2) Every CPU, including x86, involves blobs and binaries. You just don't notice as much on x86 because all the system and motherboard builders do things the same way, whereas with ARM everything is always different. I would not expect it to be any worse than any other CPU.
Amazon already has a Linux distribution, and presumably it will be available for the new platform. If you don't want to use their distribution, you'll be free to copy their kernel and use it in your own distribution, and most likely you'll be able to copy their devicetree and build your own kernel. I don't know whether you'll be able to do this without involving binary drivers. Most of the problems with ARM come in with drivers, especially GPU drivers, which are most likely irrelevant in this application.
3) This just makes Amazon's services cheaper and/or their profits larger. It doesn't give them any power they didn't already have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday March 23 2020, @11:13PM
I was like, how did Amazon make their own chip. Then, I keep reading "The chip comes from Annapurna Labs and packs 64 A76 ARM cores", so just an Amazon branded ARM CPU. That, I believe.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @11:48PM
First I’ve heard of it and it is already a top performer.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday March 24 2020, @12:19AM (2 children)
Amazon doesn't care about x86 compatibility. I suspect that, if they've spent the money to develop their own silicon, they've spent the money on compilers. C, C++, Java, Fortran, Cobol, doesn't really matter.
My understanding is both Intel and AMD are spending a huge amount of silicon maintaining x86 compatibility. If you don't bother you can get chips that are some combination of smaller, faster, heat efficient, and cheaper.
ARM has been focused on low cost, low heat, embedded applications. Be nice to see another 80's era CPU ISA arms race again that doesn't care about backwards compatibility.
The only sad part is I'm old and probably won't live to see the outcome (note: looking 20 years out, not 2).
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @01:51AM
Does anyone care about x86 compat except for Windows/Mac shitware?
Even MS themselves have a long history of other arches, their latest effort being an ARM64 partnershit with Qualcomm. Android is multiarch, as are the BSDs including Darwin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:07AM
eat your broccoli sprouts fool! :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DrkShadow on Tuesday March 24 2020, @12:27AM (2 children)
When it comes to the big calculations, or even the small users, it comes to performance per watt. The dollar cost of the chip doesn't matter -- how significant is the idle power draw, per AWS instance? That's the dollar cost, not the up-front cost.
How much is the fully-loaded power draw of the chip?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday March 24 2020, @12:54PM (1 child)
The Idle Power Draw is probably much, much better than AMD or Intel as it's an ARM based chip.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:08PM
On the other hand, since it is intended for use in AWS, idle performance may not be a big deal.