Discussion AWS Graviton2 64 vCPU Arm CPU Heightens War of Intel Betrayal

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DrMrLordX

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It is a big deal, but unless Amazon starts selling Graviton2 to other parties, it's more a story of Intel losing ODM market share than anything else. Intel has bent over backwards to make Amazon, Google, and (presumably) Microsoft happy with custom hardware and early releases. Apparently Amazon isn't happy with IceLake-SP or Cooper Lake.
 

JasonLD

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Aug 22, 2017
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It is a big deal, but unless Amazon starts selling Graviton2 to other parties, it's more a story of Intel losing ODM market share than anything else. Intel has bent over backwards to make Amazon, Google, and (presumably) Microsoft happy with custom hardware and early releases. Apparently Amazon isn't happy with IceLake-SP or Cooper Lake.

Nah, Amazon was going to do it even if Intel wasn't behind of Xeon schedules. Well, I am sure Intel would prefer to lose marketshare to AMD than ARM based servers so Intel might have to sweeten up the deals.
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
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Nah, Amazon was going to do it even if Intel wasn't behind of Xeon schedules. Well, I am sure Intel would prefer to lose marketshare to AMD than ARM based servers so Intel might have to sweeten up the deals.

It's one thing for Amazon to design the CPU in its labs. It's another for them to deploy them en masse instead of deploying Cooper Lake (because let's face it, even Amazon can't get IceLake-SP in quantity).
 

soresu

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Dec 19, 2014
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It is a big deal, but unless Amazon starts selling Graviton2 to other parties, it's more a story of Intel losing ODM market share than anything else. Intel has bent over backwards to make Amazon, Google, and (presumably) Microsoft happy with custom hardware and early releases. Apparently Amazon isn't happy with IceLake-SP or Cooper Lake.
It may be that they are diversifying to offer ARM instances for AWS uses - when decent dev boards are often expensive and anaemic it could have its uses.
 

JasonLD

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Aug 22, 2017
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It's one thing for Amazon to design the CPU in its labs. It's another for them to deploy them en masse instead of deploying Cooper Lake (because let's face it, even Amazon can't get IceLake-SP in quantity).

I think it will be beneficial for Amazon in a long run if they can provide their CPU in-house instead of relying on Intel or AMD. Even if Ice Lake-SP was in sufficient quantity, it wouldn't have stopped Amazon from deploying their own Arm based Instances.
 
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Ajay

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Well, Intel's performance and core count complacency, combined with the execution failure on 10 nm has really bit them in the butt. AWS now has great leverage to exert over Intel and even AMD in terms of pricing (much less for AMD due to $/core costs). I wonder, if for the short term, this is AWS goal? Where is Amazon doing the design work for graviton?
 

liahos1

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Aug 28, 2013
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isnt the +40% perf per vcore? I feel like people are missing the finer points here? Vcore is half intel core. Intel core has hyperthreading (vcpu).

1.4/2 = 0.7
1/0.7 = 1.43 favoring intel
 

soresu

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Well, Intel's performance and core count complacency, combined with the execution failure on 10 nm has really bit them in the butt. AWS now has great leverage to exert over Intel and even AMD in terms of pricing (much less for AMD due to $/core costs). I wonder, if for the short term, this is AWS goal? Where is Amazon doing the design work for graviton?
I believe it's the Annapurna Labs they acquired some time ago - that's an assumption, not a fact as far as I am aware.

Though I think ARM did a lot of the work for them with the N1 design, it sounds like much more than a mere core, more like a licensable whole server chip design.
 

Markfw

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I'd rather see a comparison vs 7742. All these ARM companies keep comparing to 7601P or CL-SP. We all know where leadership perf at least for the next year and a half lies.
I can say the 7601 (2p version that I have) is slower than the 2990wx, and the 7742 kicks it into oblivion, so yes, that is what I would like to see.
 

liahos1

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I'd rather see a comparison vs 7742. All these ARM companies keep comparing to 7601P or CL-SP. We all know where leadership perf at least for the next year and a half lies.

Why comp against the 7742? It's single core boost is 3.4ghz. It would be better to comp vcpu against the 8175 (3.1ghz boost) if the point of the comp was to make you look as good as possible (hence no 8276).
 

uzzi38

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Why comp against the 7742? It's single core boost is 3.4ghz. It would be better to comp vcpu against the 8175 (3.1ghz boost) if the point of the comp was to make you look as good as possible (hence no 8276).
That's not my point :p

I'd rather see where this sits amongst the top of the stack server CPU more than anything else right now. That's what's most interesting to me personally. Comparing it to random af CL-SP skus are boring.

Heck, I'd have taken a comparison to CL-AP over this, even if nobody cares about CL-AP.
 

insertcarehere

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Jan 17, 2013
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The fact that we're mentioning this chip in the same breadth as TOTL AMD epyc, costing 6 grand a pop with servers well into 5 figures, should be worrying to both Intel and AMD as to ARM's potential.

For context, a year ago its predecessor was unveiled as a 16 core A72 based design. This has 4x the cores and the A76 is a much faster individual core.
 

itsmydamnation

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The fact that we're mentioning this chip in the same breadth as TOTL AMD epyc, costing 6 grand a pop with servers well into 5 figures, should be worrying to both Intel and AMD as to ARM's potential.

For context, a year ago its predecessor was unveiled as a 16 core A72 based design. This has 4x the cores and the A76 is a much faster individual core.
Not really, in the same time AMD doubled cores + 15% IPC and increased clocks, doubled SIMD width. Its really intel 10nm failings that are allowing everyone to look 1/2 good (including AMD).
 

soresu

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Not really, in the same time AMD doubled cores + 15% IPC and increased clocks, doubled SIMD width. Its really intel 10nm failings that are allowing everyone to look 1/2 good (including AMD).
Weelll, I kinda think they're all doing well except Intel at this point - ARM is only just starting to get serious with N1, they haven't even announced its successor based on A77 yet (Zeus/N2 presumably).

Also bare in mind that ARM's projected 64C N1 chip TDP is 105W, not 225W of Epyc 7742.
 
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Failnaught

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Does Amazon have enough volume to justify developing+fabricating this chip? Or do you think they will sell it as a product as well as use it in house?
 

moinmoin

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Does Amazon have enough volume to justify developing+fabricating this chip? Or do you think they will sell it as a product as well as use it in house?
AWS own about half of the whole ever increasing cloud market. Additionally Amazon is known to push new products that may start as loss leaders.

Besides this is about Graviton 2. Garviton 1 already exists. So this is technically a mere update, nothing revolutionary.
 
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