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Amazon Web Services Introduces its Own Custom-Designed ARM Server Processor, Promises 45 Percent Lower Costs For Some Workloads (geekwire.com)
After years of waiting for someone to design an ARM server processor that could work at scale on the cloud, Amazon Web Services just went ahead and designed its own. From a report: Vice president of infrastructure Peter DeSantis introduced the AWS Graviton Processor Monday night, adding a third chip option for cloud customers alongside instances that use processors from Intel and AMD. The company did not provide a lot of details about the processor itself, but DeSantis said that it was designed for scale-out workloads that benefit from a lot of servers chipping away at a problem. The new instances will be known as EC2 A1, and they can run applications written for Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. They are generally available in four regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). Intel dominates the market for server processors, both in the cloud and in the on-premises server market. AMD has tried to challenge that lead over the years with little success, although its new Epyc processors have been well-received by server buyers and cloud companies like AWS. John Gruber of DaringFireball, where we first spotted this story, adds: Makes you wonder what the hell is going on at Intel and AMD -- first they missed out on mobile, now they're missing out on the cloud's move to power-efficient ARM chips.
Here is a corrected link without the garbage: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-introduces-custom-designed-arm-server-processor-promises-45-percent-lower-costs-workloads/
I dunno... looks pretty competitive to me, for a first try:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ar...
You can be sure that in the year hence, and with Amazon rolling their own, that they are now at least on a par with some more traditional setups.
They literally only have to be a dollar cheaper (whether in power usage or purchase cost) to start taking over.
Most people *aren't* maxing out their servers 24/7/365.25. As such, ARM could be a serious threat. Especially if they can come in anywhere near cheap or they offer other advantages (e.g. presumably, if Amazon are making their own chips, they know EXACTLY what's running on their hardware and can optimise to their exact needs, like Google does with its own motherboards etc. in-house - both security and performance get a boost from that).
The primary thing is price/processing power.
Power Consumption is part of the price. its over all performance is also a big deal, also the size the data center fills up, and ability to have staff to be able to code for the data center.
Intel and AMD server design was to boost processing power to make the radio low. However now we are moving to more parallel software designs, where we find the big power chips are not fully utilized. While we can take more cheaper slower low power chips and get more processing power for the total cost.
The Intel and AMD chips are Semi-trucks of processors while what is needed are delivery vans.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ar...
And that matches up from what I've read about ARM performance. It's competitive on relatively simple loads for data compression, encryption, and shoveling data out the door. Once you start doing regex / database / complex transnational loads, performance suffers.
Seems like a perfect solution for Cloudflare, who, basically, shovels data out the door. Not so much for a hadoop / SQL based application stack.
At some point ARM will implement transaction acceleration, and database and application platforms will be tuned for the ARM architecture, but until then I think it will be more of a niche player in the server market.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.