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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)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

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.

15 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. snicker snort by drinkypoo · · Score: 3

    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.

    Now hold on thar, pardner. The industry has been building ARM-based servers for ages. They have so far failed to take off because power consumption isn't the most important factor for servers. Let's wait to see how much of teh cloud goes ARM before we declare this the year of ARM on the server.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:snicker snort by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      On top of this the comment acts like you just flip a switch and produce a power efficient processor. Moving to ARM would involve a product that they aren't overly familiar with, in a platform (non-plug and play) that both companies generally don't have much experience with, and god forbid they may actually need to pay license fees without any guaranteed ROI.

      TFHeadline says it nicely: "Some workloads"

    2. Re:snicker snort by supremebob · · Score: 2

      I don't think that we're really sure yet that customers really WANT power-efficient ARM chips. I think that many of them are more worried about x86 compatibility right now.

      Hell... there are a lot of people out there who are afraid to move off of Intel processors because they can't be sure that their vendors validated their older software on the AMD Epyc stuff yet.

    3. Re:snicker snort by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    4. Re:snicker snort by Hadlock · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
  2. busted link? by necro81 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I click on the link for the story, and it directs me to:

    https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/11/28/1438250/&%23226;&%238364;oehttps://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-introduces-custom-designed-arm-server-processor-promises-45-percent-lower-costs-workloads/&%23226;&%238364;

    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/

  3. Commodity vs lock-in by GeLeTo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Intel and AMD have a lot to lose if the cloud moves to ARM chips. This will allow many rivals to enter the market - bringing their market share and profit margins down.

    1. Re:Commodity vs lock-in by Tsolias · · Score: 2

      cloud is fancy talk for servers and servers tend to need a lot of juice.
      There have been numerous attempts to make the transition to arm-based solutions but many big companies, but haven't got too far: amd, qualcomm, cavium, dell, hp, softiron, etc.
      I don't know why everyone reacts as if it's the first time we see this?
      Outside of a very specific spectrum, arm servers cannot offer much.

    2. Re:Commodity vs lock-in by ctilsie242 · · Score: 2

      Intel/AMD gives the best computing ability out there, well, perhaps next to SPARC and POWER, but those CPUs are not really relevant here.

      If you want CPU power, it will be Intel/AMD. If you want best CPU power per watt, ARM by far. Both have their niches. The car example would be saying a Prius is better than a class 8 Kenworth because of its fuel consumption, but the Prius is going to be hard-pressed to move 80,000 pounds of cargo.

      It would be nice if SPARC or POWER were relevant to this. I wonder if they would offer not just top tier compute power, but a better MIPS/watt radio than Intel/AMD CPUs.

  4. Niche by JBMcB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Niche by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

    2. Re:Niche by JBMcB · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
  5. ARM don't make chips by monkeyxpress · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Amazon is killing it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

  7. Re:What the hell is going on? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

    The x86 instruction set simply doesn't lend itself to pared down power efficient architectures.

    The x86 decoder is a minuscule portion of a modern processor, all of which are internally RISC anyway.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"