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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: 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).
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(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! :)