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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.
I don't think, short to mid term, it will be an issue for them. ARM is more efficient at very specific workloads, depending on the configuration. They might be used as static web servers and proxies with hardware decrypt. For heavy application and database loads, AMD and Intel - usually - still blow the doors off of ARM.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Comparing this with AMD and Intel offerings is silly, because you cannot buy a chip from ARM. They simply design the cores (and many manufacturers don't even use their reference implementations - only the ISA). There is nothing really magical about ARM except that if you are wanting to build your own processor you might as well use them because licenses are pretty cheap, there is a large range of support tools available for them, and they incorporate many of the latest features in their designs with little historical cruft attached. It also helps to have a licensor who will happily work with you on your design to reach what ever objectives you're after rather than unleash the lawyers on you.
In other words, they are an excellent place to start, the alternatives aren't that great, and there is little point rolling your own ISA unless you've discovered something pretty incredible.
After managing servers for decades, the jump to AWS had its problems, but holy shit is it effective and cuts down my daily workload considerably.
If only their documentation was coherent and usable without mental gymnastics due to poorly written and outdated electronic documents (read HTML pages).
The fact that you can't download a generic Android and install it on your ARM smartphone tells you what is still missing from the ARM world after all these years: a standard that allows an OS to enumerate all components of the system and their configuration parameters. There is no generic kernel for ARM systems. You need one configured for just the type of ARM system you want to use.
99% of my workload in AWS is on open source code, mostly python, with some commercial java products, and a couple of private proprietary java apps. The 1% that is not is our VPN software that IT runs. All of this runs in Kubernetes. Inside that number is also our entire Jenkins/Selenium CI/CD process for QA. Our Kubernetes spend is $4000-8000/month, 100% of our kubernetes spend could run on ARM tomorrow just by adding an ARM build target for the container.
If we could shrink our AWS K8S spend from $8000 to $4000 per month, that is almost $50,000 in annual savings. My boss would buy me a round trip ticket to Europe if we accomplished that kind of monthly savings.
ARM might not be useful for someone in the Windows world, but there is very much zero reason why our company would be tied to intel arch, and we weren't even trying to be architecture agnostic. I suspect that if Amazon can offer ARM at a competitive cost to intel with the same reliability, people will make the jump. I can see putting all our low priority processes on ARM in the next quarter to save money.
moox. for a new generation.