Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/technology/amazon-server-chip-intel.html

by zone411 • 8 years ago

419 349 8 years ago

nytimes.com

atonse• 8 years ago

I wanted to try to use an AWS ARM server as a bastion host running Wireguard. But a t2.nano was cheaper.

Anyone get it working? (I haven’t tried)

broknbottle• 8 years ago

The t2.nano without unlimited burst credits relies on staying under a usage threshold. Why wireguard over something like sshuttle?

kelp4• 8 years ago

FYI, t3 instances have and option to either be throttld when you exceed your burst credit or just pay more for burst.

becauseiam• 8 years ago

The article misses that months before the ARM announcement, AWS announced AMD based instances being available in m5 and r5 classes, and are cheaper than the default Intel offerings. If anything Intel might be afraid is that because the workloads that can be achieved are comparable.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 8 years ago

AMD are in a great place. TSMC's 7nm is in great shape (unlike Intel's 10nm), and AMD's multi-chip architecture allows them to get vastly better effective yields for high-core-count “chips”. They will be selling superior CPU to Intel's and they will be making them at significantly lower cost, while Intel is struggling to compete, stuck with monolithic chips on 14nm.

blackstrips• 8 years ago

That said, Intel’s 14nm is very mature though. The yields are likely very good at this point given how long they have been using it. Knowing it inside out also likely allows them to squeeze a little more performance out of it.

A pity about their 10nm. Won’t be surprised if they have given up on it by now and have shifted all resources to 7nm. Hopefully 7nm comes online before 14nm completely gives out.

stdplaceholder2• 8 years ago

I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but that’s about it.

touristtam• 8 years ago

Ye, I feel the NYT article is a bit off, specially when consulting other article about the same https://www.extremetech.com/computing/281338-amazon-launches...

comboy3• 8 years ago

This can be powerful. They don't have to build general CPU right away. Start with storage and by the time you have database boxes on ASICS designed to match your software you're already winning.

I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it. With this scale it seems like it should be a win on the long run over deploying new ASICs every few years.

adamson• 8 years ago

I'm pretty out of the loop here. Are there existing, widely used workloads that are critical for storage for which FPGAs are competitive with CPUs?

comboy3• 8 years ago

I'm just guessing that if the only thing that given box is doing is handling very specific internal S3 API, you can probably optimize a few things over a multi-purpose architecture.

I'm totally blue and I'll be honest - when I want to learn about something, it seems that stating some thesis gets me way more information from HN vs asking a question, especially when it turns out to be wrong ;)

clouddrover2• 8 years ago

Video encoding is a good example. NGCodec makes FPGA based video encoders:

https://ngcodec.com/

muricula• 8 years ago

Not storage, networking: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

comboy3• 8 years ago

Indeed, with networking it seems to have already happened, if I remember correctly Google also uses software defined networking based on their own hardware (not sure if FPGAs are involved)

trevyn• 8 years ago

FPGAs are much larger (read: more expensive in volume) and slower than ASICs, so if you have the unit volume and calendar time to do an ASIC and know roughly what it needs to be optimized for, FPGAs really can’t compete. FPGAs are effective for more exotic smaller-scale use cases where unit cost is less of an issue.

PowerfulWizard2• 8 years ago

The CPU is the third such project that I'm aware of, also checkout their Nitro hypervisor and disk interface: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...

I know they did their own networking hardware, but I don't know if it was done by the same team that did this CPU and Nitro.

clouddrover2• 8 years ago

Twitch (which is owned by Amazon) is rolling out VP9 video to their site for about a 25% bitrate saving over H.264. Since Twitch is almost entirely live video they needed a VP9 encoder fast enough to keep up at the quality they wanted. They found libvpx wasn't fast enough for their live video use case so they're using an FPGA VP9 encoder from NGCodec:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4HnM26Fwaw

https://ngcodec.com/news/2018/11/12/ngcodec-to-deliver-broad...

In a couple of years Twitch will start deploying AV1 streams. I imagine they'll take a similar approach for that as well.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

From the article: "Amazon licensed much of the technology from ARM, the company that provides the basic technology for most smartphone chips. It made the chip through TSMC, a Taiwanese company."

Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee and had their variant manufactured for them by TSMC.

I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree.

That said, the interesting thing about this article is that given Intel's margins, a company like Amazon feels they can take on the huge cost of integrating a CPU, support chips, and related components to achieve $/CPU-OP margins that are better than letting Intel or AMD eat all of that design and validation expense.

This sort of move by Amazon and AMD's move to aggressively price the EPYC server chips, really puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Intel.

projektfu2• 8 years ago

I think it's fair to call it home grown, like in house, but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel. Seems unlikely. Amazon also has to be careful now not to run afoul of anyone's IP as they can't farm out that responsibility to other providers.

hbosch• 8 years ago

but to say it threatens Intel is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel.

The implication is that Amazon is everyone's datacenter.

Despegar• 8 years ago

Well I'd say it's certainly a big risk to Intel. For one, a lot of Intel customers are going in-house with chip design. Apple on its own might not hurt much, but add a few more like Amazon or Google, and things can really unravel. If you're an integrated chip designer and you lose volume, you're in for a lot of pain.

The thing that defines Amazon in recent years is their desire to make everything a third party service (AWS, Fulfillment, etc) and they may in fact do that for their own chips. So while Apple may never sell their chips to anyone, Amazon may decide to enter the merchant chip business (if they decide it's not a competitive advantage). Maybe they wouldn't sell it to Microsoft or Google, but certainly other companies that they don't compete with that operate their own servers (Facebook). And then Intel would really be losing volume.

zumu• 8 years ago

it... is like saying that Amazon has introduced a server chip that will take over everyone's datacenters from Intel.

AWS is what is actively taking over data centers. If it were to start running on Amazon chips, the result may possibly the same.

jimbokun2• 8 years ago

It may not be "home grown", depending on how you want to define that term, but it does point to a vector for Intel's business model to be disrupted.

Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it, and then going to TSMC or some other manufacturing specialist could steadily eat away at Intel's market share and margins. Apple has now gone this route, Amazon is testing the waters, and other tech giants probably aren't far behind.

monocasa8• 8 years ago

Going to ARM for chip IP, tweaking it

Just going to throw out there that Amazon paid more for Annapurna than Apple paid for P.A. Semi. That very well might imply that they have a custom uarch. Homegrown very well might be an apt adjective.

monocasa8• 8 years ago

I find the characterization "home grown" as a stretch here, had they designed their own instruction set etc I might agree.

Would you say the same thing about Apple, who has their own ARM uarch?

zapita• 8 years ago

Apple is also a TSMC customer I believe.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Yes.

twtw3• 8 years ago

The only really useful distinction that can be made here is between companies that have architecture licenses, and therefore can design their own uarch, and companies with any other kind of arm license.

dang• 8 years ago

Ok, we've taken out the word "homegrown" above.

andyidsinga• 8 years ago

its conceivable (even likely?) that they've developed some exotic peripherals that go along with the arm core in order to complete their asic ...which sort of gets them into the same ballpark of defining their own ISA.

twtw3• 8 years ago

Amazon became an ARM architecture licensee

Does Amazon really have an ARM architecture license? I thought these chips were using stock ARM cores (licensing cores only, not architecture).

I asked on HN on the original announcement and it sounded like that was the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553028

Also, I would argue that a custom ISA matters far less than a custom microarchitecture. After all, Intel is (mostly) using AMD's ISA.

evancox1007• 8 years ago

Also curious about this. Would be shocked if Amazon went straightaway for an architecture license.

40acres• 8 years ago

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!)

There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips, but if they display competency they'll certainly be able to squeeze more out of Intel.

jimbokun2• 8 years ago

But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them.

And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.

btian• 8 years ago

But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale.

I don't see why they would fail this time.

abfan1127• 8 years ago

TSMC can run the masks, but if the design is not sound, then it doesn't matter how good the transistors are. Power islands, clock domain crossings, proper DFT, DFM, etc. are all needed to get a good design.

Nokinside2• 8 years ago

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all.

1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it.

2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process.

3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process.

As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time to shrink.

^^ Note that this is entirely baseless speculation.

bstx• 8 years ago

ARM architectural licensees develop their own microarchitectures that implement the ARM ISA spec, they do not license any particular microarchitecture from ARM (e.g. Cortex-A? IP cores). That includes Apple, Samsung, Nvidia and others.

bogomipz11• 8 years ago

'They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it."

What is a "node" in this context? I'm not familiar enough with FAB terminology.

bogomipz11• 8 years ago

Might you or anyone else be able to recommend a book or some literature on business and logistical side of third party chip design like this? Maybe something with some case studies?

whynotminot• 8 years ago

Do you realize how many devices Apple sells a year? I think they've figured out the scale thing ok.

product50• 8 years ago

This is what Intel supporters always say till the time everyone builds those chips and there is no market left for Intel at all. It is just so sad that Intel, which had such a ferocious lead and was on the cutting edge of processor design/manufacturing, is now dying from a thousand cuts.

Just look at the industry - everyone who is a major player in cloud, AI, or mobile (Apple, Huawei, & Samsung) are now in the chip business themselves. How will Intel grow? And where would this so called scale advantage come in?

Wake up and smell the coffee.

Brybry• 8 years ago

How is Intel dying? Losing a near monopoly is a far cry from dying.

And Amazon's Graviton/armv8 chips aren't going to be competitive for many workloads. If you look up benchmarks you'll see they generally aren't competitive in terms of performance[1].

They'll only be competitive in terms of cost (and, generally, not even performance/cost).

I'm personally pleased that there is more competition but I find that saying Intel is dying to be silly.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-grav...

electrograv• 8 years ago

It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips

As a strategic move, this makes a lot of sense for Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is a company known for excellence in a diverse set of disciplines, and TSMC has an excellent reputation for delivering state-of-the-art CPUs at scale — yet you are here to doubt they can pull it off, despite providing no evidence or rationale for your position?

The burden of proof is on you to justify your pessimism. If you have evidence for your claim that Amazon + TSMC will have problems scaling, please provide it.

jawnv66• 8 years ago

how many amazon customers have they migrated to their existing ARM solutions?

like that's the bit that's missing, the servers sitting on a rack are meaningless without ARM customers, and amazon chips not existing didn't somehow prevent the demand. they sell arm compute now and it's a paltry fraction of the whole. pretending it's about TSMC scaling is ridiculous.

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

Delivering almost any package to my house in two days at scale seems a lot harder than making chips at scale and they did that already.

evancox1007• 8 years ago

Unfortunately I think making cutting edge chips is harder these days. Just going on cost, the most expensive Amazon fulfillment center comes in at $200 million, the most expensive fab is $14 billion, from Samsung, with word of a $20 billion fab coming from TSMC.

askafriend2• 8 years ago

Apple sold 217 MILLION iPhones in just 2017 alone.

That's a number that doesn't include iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Macs - all of which have custom Apple silicon in them.

I think you're severely underestimating Apple here.

pjmlp8• 8 years ago

There are lots of countries around the world where common people hardly get to see an Apple device on the wild.

marcosdumay2• 8 years ago

Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale

Isn't it exactly the other way around?

imtringued• 8 years ago

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers? Scaleway offers 8 core servers with 8GB for almost half the monthly price of the cheapest ARM instance (with 1 core) amazon offers. Even the 16 core instance doesn't make sense. Packet.net will give you a whole 96 core server for the same price with 4x the memory. Capable ARM hardware has existed for years already and AWS is barely able to catch up.

Yes, I know AWS' target group is small startups and big enterprises who couldn't care less about how much their servers costs them. But at the same time this means switching to a new architecture for meager cost savings isn't attractive to them at all. They are willing to pay a premium if it means that things "just work". As long as this barrier exists ARM servers have zero chance of threatening intel.

twblalock• 8 years ago

Yes, I know AWS' target group is small startups and big enterprises who couldn't care less about how much their servers costs them.

When you choose a cloud provider you aren't just renting servers, you are getting access to an ecosystem of supporting services like load balancing, DNS, monitoring systems, container orchestration, cloud-specific databases and event systems, datacenters across the word, 24/7 oncall support, etc.

Nobody offers as many features as AWS. Not Google, not Azure, and certainly not Scaleway. And when they offer as many features I bet they'll charge close to the same price.

Dismissing the valid reasons people have for choosing AWS in the way you did is completely incorrect.

blihp2• 8 years ago

Because this is just their first generation of chips. Should Amazon stick with it, they will get better at it and costs will come down while performance goes up. This should scare Intel because they have been banking on the data center for future growth. This looks like pretty much their last stand for a place where they can maintain margins. They lost mobile very early on. More recently it's looking like PCs are at risk thanks to competition from AMD. If they start losing their large volume enterprise customers, they'll need to come up with a plan D.

beagle3• 8 years ago

That might be the first generation under the Amazon brand, but my 3 year old Synology is using an Annapurna CPU; Amazon's chips are built the Annapurna (acquired by Amazon) team.

karmasimida• 8 years ago

Not overpriced if there isn't any other vendor doing the same thing.

cperciva• 8 years ago

Why should intel be scared of AWS selling overpriced ARM servers?

Because if AWS is selling overpriced ARM servers, they're not selling overpriced Intel servers. I think it's safe to say that Intel has big profit margins on customized Xeons.

tptacek• 8 years ago

I'm not clear on why Intel should care that there are cheaper Scaleway cores available; presumably what they care about is whether they're the most cost-effective option at AWS. An at-scale existence proof that routinely running serverside ARM software is cheaper than running it on Intel chips is problematic for them.

kondro• 8 years ago

It's not the simplistic bare-metal services that are growing in AWS. It's all their serverless products where the end-user could care less what the underlying tech is running on so long as the API/performance is what they expect.

Amazon runs a very large number of fully managed load balances, S3/DynamoDB data servers, Lambda clouds, etc. More than 90% of their services are completely abstract the user away from the underlying architecture.

It doesn't matter what AWS charges for these services wholesale (and I believe they're currently providing same performance in EC2 at about a 40% cost saving over the Intel equivalent), the value is in the cost saving of them running their own services on this tech.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

You're right however...

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Then

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"

Now

"Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS services"

cronix• 8 years ago

I could almost hear Larry Ellison snickering in the background as I read this. I wonder how much Amazon pays Oracle, anyway? I think in '16 is was around $60M (according to Ellison: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/12/oracles-la... )

PowerfulWizard2• 8 years ago

Some more info here: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/

bgee• 8 years ago

may or may not be on-topic: ‘Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-tal...

ejz• 8 years ago

Um, and AMD.

j1vms• 8 years ago

Well, guess Intel's thinking "there's always Microsoft (Azure)."

I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.

stcredzero5• 8 years ago

Microsoft can compile everything on ARM if they want to. No reason why Azure would be completely stuck on Intel chips.

cbsmith4• 8 years ago

They can compile "everything" that Microsoft has written to ARM. There's a small matter of, you know, all the other stuff.

kev009• 8 years ago

Yawn, the amount of publicity ARM gets for free for the past decade to enter the data center is perplexing. The economy of these designs are not good versus the competition full stop.

There are three chips that work well in the data center: EPYC, Xeon, and POWER. All of these are billion dollar designs. Nothing about the ARM ecosystem supports designing to these same constraints or spending that amount of money to enter this space seriously.

twoodfin• 8 years ago

Pretty funny to see “Dave Patterson” described as “a Google chip specialist”!

cbsmith4• 8 years ago

I was like, "is that the same Dave Patterson?", and then thinking about Google & typical tech journalism I realized, "yeah, of course it is".

Solar19• 8 years ago

Why ARM though? The article touts how this is a homegrown chip, and Amazon obviously has the resources to build a truly homegrown, optimized CPU. Why use ARM instead and import all of its idiosyncrasies?

I guess I could ask the question more broadly. Why does every company that "designs its own chip" use ARM instead of designing its own ISA? How much work does it save? How much optimization does it forsake? I'm reminded of John Regehr's post on discovering the optimal instruction set: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/669

pcwalton• 8 years ago

It's not just the ISA that you get when you license from ARM: it's the entire HDL source. If you go even further and get an architecture license, you also get a whole bunch of fundamental technical documents and a test suite. This saves a ton of time.

There's the issue of software compatibility. Writing a port of Linux—kernel and userland—is a ton of work. And if you have other chips on board, such as a GPU, the only drivers available may be ARM-only binary blobs. There might be an entire ecosystem of ARM software you have to keep supporting (which is one reason why Apple doesn't [yet] design their own ISA).

RISC-V has a small chance of commoditizing some of this stuff someday, but not yet.

twtw3• 8 years ago

how much work does it save?

Really a lot of work. Software compatibility and availability will make or break a processor. Unless you own the entire stack and are willing to deal with the struggles of a custom ISA, nobody wants to make a new one - the benefits probably aren't that great.

kelp4• 8 years ago

This can't be overstated for a cloud provider, especially one like AWS that wants to run everything for everyone. ARM has good OS and compiler support, and if you want people to move some workloads off x86 to another architecture, you're gonna want that migration to be as painless as possible.

justincormack• 8 years ago

Because it is a lot of work to build from scratch, and build the whole software ecosystem. Risc-V is the other option but it is not yet as mature for server chips, and the software stack is only just starting to ship. Arm servers have only just reached maturity after some years.

pjc503• 8 years ago

How much work does it save?

Designing your own incompatible non-mainstream ISA basically commits you to maintaining your own compiler toolchain(s) and port of Linux distribution(s). That's dozens to hundreds of software engineers, continuously.

How much optimization does it forsake?

Not a great deal, unless your workload is very unusual or you spend all your time running one algorithm.

It seems that what Amazon are doing is adding extensions or changes to facilitate hypervisors - not changes to the instruction set at all, but changes in the way system calls, hypervisor calls, and interrupts are handled.

jabl3• 8 years ago

Aarch64 (does this chip even bother supporting 32-bit?) is much less idiosyncratic than the older 32-bit arm. Also, arm server platform has UEFI (for all its faults), providing a x86 like plug and play experience. And, like others already said, they are getting an entire ecosystem as part of the deal.

Risc-v might get there one day, but not yet.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

Apologies in advance for the layperson question:

It's my understanding that a lot of CPU gains come from caching. That suggests to me that there is potential performance to be gained by caching across a larger number of machines.

Is that something Amazon could do here? Somehow connect all their machines and cache in a huge space?

Maybe individual physical machines would be more like a front end for a cache space, and when I get an Amazon instance, it's actually a "virtual" CPU that pieces together instructions that are mostly already cached in various places throughout the network?

Is that even theoretically possible, or is it total fantasy?

rblatz• 8 years ago

Cache is insanely fast, orders of magnitude faster than ram, and basically instant compared to going to disk or another machine on the network. I would find it unlikely that they could overcome the added network latency introduced in such a system.

Edit: check this out for more info https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...

sharpneli• 8 years ago

And to give the 1ns L1 access time some physicality. During 1 nanosecond light in vacuum travels 30 centimeters, or 12 inches. Signals in conductors travel slower. It is ridiculously short amount of time.

This means that there will absolutely never* be anything that can give faster access that is going to be farther than that from the CPU. Or more specifically half of that distance as the message to request what part of the cache to read must travel to the cache itself.

* Unless we find out FTL is possible. But it's a rather safe bet to assume no.

Merad• 8 years ago

I'm going by memory here, but IIRC the fastest level of CPU cache (L1) can be accessed in about 2 nanoseconds. Even the slowest level (L3) operates on the order of a few hundred nanoseconds. RAM is slow by comparison, and network latency is so much slower it's basically glacial.

evancox1007• 8 years ago

Your idea is impractical from a "caching for performance" perspective, for the reasons other have pointed out.

However, there is work to enable multi-machine coherent memory. I just saw [1] today. This is kind of similar, you're giving a single, unified view to memory across multiple machines. But you do this to easily share data as part of a new programming paradigm, not to speed up your code.

https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releas...

trumped• 8 years ago

an amazon chip would be the last thing I would want to buy seeing how awful their tablets are....

mmaunder• 8 years ago

Amazon sell compute to the world. This is vertical integration and makes sense at a certain scale. That scale has to be massive, but they appear to have reached it. They may have chosen to execute sooner if they also plan to sell the chips to hardware vendors like Dell and the financials check out.

maddyboo• 8 years ago

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to my partner (who isn't a programmer) why I think open source software and hardware is so important. My argument is that without enough core components in the industry standard tech stack being open source, the more likely companies who develop solutions will restrict user freedom.

For example, Apple has been able to own nearly their entire iDevice stack from manufacturing to silicon to firmware to OS to ecosystem. They have very little incentive to interoperate with external organizations via open standards because they own many of the pieces which need to be interoperable. Thus, they can force users and developers to use their tooling, the applications they approve of, dictate what code will run on their platform, and how easily you can inspect, modify, or repair their products.

This is all to say, it is easy to imagine a future where all performance-competitive technology is entirely built upon proprietary, locked down stacks – AND – it will be at a level of complexity and specificity that independent people simply cannot gain access to the ability to create competitive solutions. It could be back to the days of the mainframe, but worse, where only the corporations who create the technology will have access to the knowledge and tools to experiment and innovate on a competitive scale.

Amazon wants developers to build solutions entirely on top of their platform using closed source core components. They also want to control the silicon their own platform runs on. In 10 years, what else will they own, how much will this effect the freedom offered by competitors, and what impact will it all have on our freedom to build cool shit?

reikonomusha2• 8 years ago

For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX.

Compare that to Windows, which has ostensibly less control, but I continue to find to be a massive pain to develop for.

With that said, if macOS lost UNIX, I’d be done.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

Meai• 8 years ago

You are speaking from inside the walled garden here, from the outside the effort of porting to macOS is monumental. The naive way is: I have to buy hardware, learn new Apple specific languages, learn a new OS, learn a new IDE, be compliant with their app store policies, distribution etc. (which applies to Windows now too I suppose).

amelius2• 8 years ago

For Apple, I find almost the opposite in terms of forced development. If I want to write a program on macOS, I can expect the porting effort to Linux to be simple if not trivial, thanks to UNIX.

Reminds me of the days when I had to buy Windows to test if my website worked on IE.

In the case of Apple, I have to buy the hardware too!

pjmlp8• 8 years ago

Historical accident of rebooting Copland with NeXTSTEP, which wasn't even relevant for NeXT beyond bringing developers into NeXTSTEP world.

The real Apple developer culture is around Objective-C and Swift tooling, alongside OS Frameworks, none of them related to UNIX in any form.

In case you haven't been paying attention the new network stack isn't even based on POSIX sockets.

Koshkin4• 8 years ago

Yes, you can write a UNIX program that will run on MacOS. You can even use Autotools and X Window API. On the other hand, a usual MacOS application is not "a UNIX program."

PostOnce• 8 years ago

Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement.

I think I'm not only doing them a service by avoiding lock-in to AWS specific "stuff", but also our industry and society at large by maintaining software diversity and openness. Often they also save a nontrivial amount of money by not using AWS (RDS has been particularly egregious).

Just making suggestions (rather than demands or whatever) is very powerful, particularly if they respect you and there is some solid logic behind your suggestion.

dokalanyi• 8 years ago

What alternatives to AWS could save a non trivial amount of money? Especially for RDS? I think we're getting to the point where servers cost quite a bit

greyskull• 8 years ago

I started my professional career in AWS so I have zero experience in non-cloud businesses (i.e the vast majority of software jobs), but I always wonder about the cost argument people make against AWS (or any major cloud provider).

It's very easy to overspend, sure. But say we're considering how well you execute in terms of picking the right tools for your case and utilizing the right cost saving measures. In the optimal to average case, does AWS really lose out when considering the cost in human time to match against the feature set you get? e.g. Hardware and software maintenance, fault tolerance, scaling, compliance, security, integrations, etc.? I'm asking out of ignorance here.

I don't mean to say that every business needs a large feature set (the vast majority probably do not), but there's value in not having to do all of these things on your own. Or even having the freedom to go make an arbitrarily complex application, or expand what you already have, with relatively low barrier to entry.

nova22033• 8 years ago

Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement.

so what do you recommend instead of Amazon?

baybal2• 8 years ago

They have very little incentive to interoperate with external organizations via open standards because they own many of the pieces which need to be interoperable. Thus, they can force users and developers to use their tooling, the applications they approve of, dictate what code will run on their platform, and how easily you can inspect, modify, or repair their products.

I myself is wondering why this is not yet the case.

Say, TSMC opening up a "privilege tier" only to those companies willing to make their chips with DRM to check executable signatures against their keys, and they will only be issuing signatures for non-insignificant amount of money.

pjc503• 8 years ago

TSMC are ""just"" a factory, they're not the ones with enough market power to do that and it would really annoy their customers. It's more people like Apple we're talking about here.

petra• 8 years ago

> and what impact will it all have on our freedom to build cool shit?

Considering how much the cloud, and it's many services has improved our ability stuff, and will further improve it - i don't think that our ability to build cool stuff will be more limited than before the cloud. Quite the opposite.

But we'll need to pay more money to Amazon.

ryacko2• 8 years ago

Performance competitive technology requires paying for its development. Electronics manufacturing is inherently heavy industry, nothing short of mandating FPGAs would tilt it any other way.

The world we live in is built upon a series of choices, the most important of which is whether you take a higher paying job or building what you desire.

There will always be a lag between the latest product, or in the case of Linux vs Unix, reverse engineering and developing a compatible product.

rbanffy12• 8 years ago

nothing short of mandating FPGAs would tilt it any other way.

I can think of multiple alternatives that could be taken in isolation or combined.

- Regulating the market and splitting foundries from their IP developers (this may not even be necessary at this point)

- Funding development of a rich set of public-domain IP that could be used to build a common standard platform

- Direct all government purchases to be of such public-domain standards

- If necessary, fund capacity so that the foundry market remains competitive even in small runs.

ramijames• 8 years ago

I help run a blockchain tech company (https://get-scatter.com/) who is creating an Oauth like stack that lets regular users access decentralized systems. A lot of the philosophy from FOSS is thriving in those communities and for the same reasons: the web has become incredibly centralized. For many people it is entirely limited to access via walled gardens of app stores and social platforms. For those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, we remember the web as a very different place and long for it. For those in the east, especially China, there is a very real problem of privacy and access which decentralized systems help alleviate.

I'm all for FOSS in every way. I wish more people were. We are collectively painting ourselves into a corner by allowing these enormous corporations access to every detail of our lives. Computing should make us more free, not less.

simonh2• 8 years ago

All of what you say is true and I completely agree it's important to have open solutions out there. What vertical solutions offer though is accountability.

If there is a security issue in the iPhone everybody knows who owns the problem. If there are scammy apps in the iOS App Store - and there actually are - everyone knows who has the power and responsibility to clean that up.

metildaa2• 8 years ago

Open source isn't a solution to the problem you bring up, proper maintenance processes are.

A great example of this is the Debian package archive, with 51,000 packages in the archive, you know each package has a maintainer that has vetted that package, and they will maintain it for the rest of the release (usually 2 or 3 years) even if the developers of it wander off or disappear.

Key to this is the Debian Social Contract, which defines what is acceptable, and when maintainers should start ripping out malicious anti-features or reject malicious updates from the upstream project: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

Comparatively, PyPI & npm are unmaintained dumping grounds of sketchy software, like copying code sight unseen off StackOverflow, but with the added risk of every update potentially being malicious.

The lack of separate, objective maintainers for these package archives has caused a plethora of issues, from packages randomly disappearing, anti-features being added, to malicious code being embedded. This is a cultural issue around managing packages that the Free Software world mostly solved decades ago, yet Open Source communities like nodejs can't figure out these basic processes that prevent bad shit from happening to packages in their archive.

sametmax• 8 years ago

And how did that work out ? Apple is still doing whatever they want, shut down competition and steal ideas, but never pays any consequences for their mistakes.

So how is that any good for us ?

amelius2• 8 years ago

In my experience, if a company owns the entire supply chain then they are usually a (semi-)monopoly and don't care much about actual the problems you have, unless they also affect a large percentage of their customer base.

godelmachine2• 8 years ago

The thing you are trying to speak in favor of is Android.

Google itself has admitted that Android itself is a mess by lieu of the fact that they open sourced it in the first place.

Good thing Apple kept everything proprietary. There’s at least one Technology Stack I can place my trust on.

dexen• 8 years ago

The thing you are trying to speak in favor of is Apple Macintosh, with its proprietary OS long since replaced by POSIX-based and Mach-based MacOS X.

We had beautiful gaming consoles, beautiful Macintoshes, and IBM mainframes, and beautiful Burroughs and Symbolics' Lisp Machines, and the Commodore C=64s.

And yet here we are, the open ecosystem has won again, as it naturally does, based on the costs structure and information propagation.

The consoles are PCs now. The mainframe of yesteryear is now a datacenter built from souped-up PCs. The mobile phones, at first dominated by proprietary OSes, are tilting ever more towards desktop-grade OSes. And the C=64s are dead and the demoscene is delivering the eulogy.

jeswin• 8 years ago

Google itself has admitted that Android itself is a mess by lieu of the fact that they open sourced it in the first place.

Can you provide a source for this claim?

DavidNielsen• 8 years ago

In fairness to Apple they are these days quite the Open Source company. Their main language is fully open source in every sense the word. You can get large parts of their base OS under an acceptable license as well as their stack, much of which is developed in the open or work is open sourced as Apple is able to. Of course they will keep back OSS code if it means making a big splash at a presentation but I don’t think that is a bad thing as such, who would deny them a bit of theatre.

They also do a lot of tech blogging on their Open source code, especially the Safari and WebKit team have some excellent posts regularly.

Sure they have proprietary magic in there but it is not as big a part of the pie as people imagine, and certainly less than in years past.

The same is true for Microsoft, who now famously aims to be the biggest Open Source company in the world (having acquired GitHub, Xamarin and many others, as well as made partners and friends out of enemies of the past, to help them on that journey).

In fact I can’t think of a single major company in the business which hasn’t embraced Open Source to some degree. I don’t think that the Apple strategy of controlling the entire experience means what it used to anymore. It doesn’t mean locking you in to just one way of doing things, we now know that we need the compiler, tools and stack to be available and truly free, as a bare minimum for this to work and experience shows that the more work we share, in general, the better an experience we can present to users and developer.

Open Source has won, all these companies taking on designing their own chips, datacenters, OSes, languages and so on, they would not be possible without that commonly shared mass of work.

Famously FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard, until someone threatened to sue them for damages to the tunes of X times infinity, which is a fairly large dollar amount for any given value of X.

rvp-x• 8 years ago

Neither of those are open companies. Stop listening to their marketing departments.

teekert• 8 years ago

The positive view would be that the market always has enough demand for open source software and open hardware because as you say it would make it impossibly hard to start as a new small player in a closed, controlled market and the would kill innovation. The coming year will be important and interesting in this regard.

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

Amazon is not the only game in town. They are competing not on cost but on feature set. However, for them running their own chips is mainly a way to optimize cost. Open source hardware is going to be a key enabler for them. Right now both Apple and Amazon are still using arm based processors, which are not open sourced but very common. The whole point of that is that it allows them to leverage open source compiler tool chains, open source kernels, etc. Replicating that stuff internally as a proprietary me-too style implementation is stupendously expensive. Neither Amazon nor Apple do that.

Instead they roll their own chips optimized for their own use case. As open source chipsets based on e.g. risc-v become more popular, tool support for that will become more popular and it will become a natural choice for building custom hardware. Breaking apart the near monopoly that Intel has had on this since the nineteen seventies is a good thing IMHO. Having a not so benevolent dictator (Intel) that has arguably been asleep at the wheel for a while now is slowing everybody down. This is what is driving people to do their own chips: they think they can do better.

The flip side is that companies building their own custom chipsets need to maintain interoperability. If they diverge too much from what the rest of the world is doing, they risk isolating themselves at great cost because it makes integrating upstream changes harder and it requires modifying standard tool chains and maintaining those modifications. Creating your own chip is one thing. Forking, e.g. llvm or the linux kernel is another thing. You need some damn good reasons to do that and opt out of all the work others are doing continually on that. Some people do of course (e.g. Google forked the linux kernel a few years back) but it buys them a lot of hassle mostly and not a whole lot of differentiation. They seem to be gradually trying to get back to running main line kernels now.

If Amazon, Apple, MS, Google, Nvidia, etc. each start doing their own chip designs, they'll either create a lot of work for themselves reinventing a lot of wheels or they get smart about collaborating on designs, code, and standardized tool chains. My guess is the latter is already happening and is exactly what enables this to begin with. Standard tool chains, open chip designs, an open market of chip manufacturers, etc. are what is enabling this. Embedded development was locked up in completely proprietary tool and hardware stacks for decades. That is now changing. You are describing the past few decades not the future.

hawski• 8 years ago

It means that it's time to break down those companies with antitrust laws. Apple, Google and Amazon should be broken to many separate companies.

hellisothers• 8 years ago

Apple isn’t forcing anybody to do anything. Not only do you have other options, they’re not even the biggest fish and they’re not trying to be.

zjaffee3• 8 years ago

I have to disagree here, because the breakup of vertically integrated monopolies has been something that has been done by governments before. Entire components being open source certainly reduce the barrier for further closed source components, but we can develop open standards regulations that require certain middleware to be open and interoperable to prevent monopolization.

plinkplonk• 8 years ago

(Tangential) What I'd really like to see is a competitor to Google's TPU that I can actually buy (vs rent on the cloud)

DeathArrow3• 8 years ago

Check here: https://www.amazon.com/PNY-TCSV100MPCIE-PB-Nvidia-Tesla-v100...

paulie_a• 8 years ago

Amd has been kicking the shit out of Intel for 30 years. No seemed to notice. Their 386 was faster than Intel 486. The octa core that is tenish years old is still competitive against non Xeon chips. At the time it completely destroyed intela chips for half or less of the price. Intel is doing nothing new and just gliding. They haven't done anything interesting in 20 years, the p4s and rdram were an incredible pile of junk. The itanic.. that says it all

It's cute I get a downvoted instead of an actual rebuttal. Amd has been doing great work for a far less price, Intel has been phoning it in for decades, and for a good bit of time making inferior technology.

kelp4• 8 years ago

I'm by no means an expert in this, and maybe it's a bit obvious, but hadn't seen this mentioned yet.

I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs.

Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains.

The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads.

The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages.

I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads.

I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.)

If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal.

I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like.

It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.

snaky2• 8 years ago

the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads

Sure, the cloud is a classical mainframe, and mainframes are famous for using specialized hardware for pretty much everything.

sunstone• 8 years ago

And Amazon is not alone. Other potential candidates to add to list include AMD, Apple and Qualcomm. Maybe a few others that don't come to mind right away.

skybrian• 8 years ago

You might compare this with Google's partnership with IBM, using POWER chips in their data centers.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-cente...

ksec2• 8 years ago

Designing an ARM Chip from ARM blueprint and TSMC is relatively simple and cheap for Amazon. And there is enough market and hype to justify the investment as they will probably break even within 24 months. It has become obvious that Intel isn't really willing to lower price that affect margin and sales. So Amazon needs to make a statement to Intel to say they have lots of options, EPYC and ARM.

I don't want to hype Zen 2 / EPYC 2, but I do think it will be very competitive. And that is a Threat to Intel. And fundamentally, the REAL threat is neither ARM, AMD or even RSIC-V, it is TSMC.

nickik2• 8 years ago

To bad they are not doing this with RISC-V. Getting a large costumer and high performance implementations would been a great boost.

Since this is about vertical integration for them it would make a certain amount of sense.

DeathArrow3• 8 years ago

Bad for RISC-V, good for Amazon. RISC-V is in a far less usable state than ARM ISA.

nickik2• 8 years ago

Why would it be bad for RISC-V if a large company invest money and moves workloads to it?

Of course RISC-V is not as a far as ARM but if Amazon really had that strategy the ISA would hardly be their primary problem.

acqq• 8 years ago

The article is non technical. For those who search for that:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton...

"Semiconductor industry watcher David Schor shared SciMark and C-Ray benchmarks for the 16-core Graviton. In the SciMark testing, the AWS system-on-chip was twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on Linux 4.14."

http://codepad.org/wZe5SrjI

""It does well on the Phoronix Test Suite," he said. "It does poorly benchmarking our website fully deployed on it: Nginx + PHP + MediaWiki, and everything else involved. This is your 'real world' test. All 16 cores can't match even 5 cores of our Xeon E5-2697 v4.""

"The system-on-chips use a mix of Arm's data-center-friendly Neoverse technology, and Annapurna's in-house designs. The 16 vCPU instances are arranged in four quad-core clusters with 2MB of shared L2 cache per cluster, and 32KB of L1 data cache, and 48KB of L1 instruction cache, per core. One vCPU maps to one physical core."

aneutron• 8 years ago

They're ignoring the fact that it's not even the same ISA, not even the same use cases or maturity for these ISAs, and that for them to actually produce a x86 chip, the only way to do that is to licence either AMD or Intel as IIRC they're the only ones to hold the x86 patent.

That or change the way a majority of the software stack was written for the past 15 years.

gpderetta9• 8 years ago

A lot of the software stack was rewritten in the past 10 year to make sure that it would work well on ARM though. ARM itself contributed to the effort.

DeathArrow3• 8 years ago

It's not exactly a threat. Amazon use cortex A72 in their CPUs and there's no way they can replace most Intel CPUs with that. The performance isn't there.

rbanffy12• 8 years ago

It looks they are after the uses where an Intel server-grade CPU is overkill. If an A72 solves my problem and is cheaper than the cheapest x86 I can get, A72 it'll be. ARM servers are very useful for low base loads.

If the demand gets higher, there is no reason not to spin up a couple x86's to take the load off the ARM boxes.

simonh2• 8 years ago

The threat is the potential for this to encroach on Intel's territory in the future, not necessarily this specific chip. The article makes this clear by opening with talk of a 'new line of work' and 'going the do-it-yourself route'. This is about the trend, not the moment and I thought they did a good job clearly framing it that way.

ptman• 8 years ago

There are workloads where I/O and RAM dominate

novaRom• 8 years ago

In the near future we will see more and more chips coming from Asia. Not just final silicon production, test, and packaging, but also complete hardware design. They will produce GPUs, FPGAs, and CPUs of all classes.

Look how many students in Computer Design, Digital Design, Electrical Engineering graduate every single year. Multiply that by low costs with high productivity and you will find Silicon Valley will face a very strong competitor.

yonkshi• 8 years ago

I think we will also see proportionally more and more chips coming out of US companies as well.

When Google started their own chips (TPUs), they just kickstarted a vertical integration race amongst the tech giants. Apple, Intel, Nvidia were the old players, Google is dipping their toes in with TPU, now Amazon and probably soon Microsoft and FB.

I think overall we will see more chips from both Asia and US

evancox1007• 8 years ago

Microsoft has been doing custom silicon longer than either Google or Amazon, as a part of the Xbox security-related functionality I believe. And then other consumer products like Hololens, custom pen ASIC in Surface, etc. Now Azure Sphere (more so giving away silicon IP to others, but still have their fingers in it.)

Edit: All this in addition to their widespread and well documented usage of FPGAs for Azure network offload and Bing acceleration.

fareesh2• 8 years ago

How does competition work with regard to trade secrets like chip design etc? If I hire the top dogs at a chip maker and they design a similar chip for my company from memory, how is this prevented from happening?

wmf2• 8 years ago

There are patents and non-competes in some states but basically nothing prevents it. Silicon Valley exists because of the cycle of engineers leaving established companies to start startups (or now, leaving established companies to go to companies that are branching out into every area possible).

fareesh2• 8 years ago

Would patenting the chip design also expose the very secret that is being guarded? So someone in China could just read the patent and make the same thing, is that right?

karakanb• 8 years ago

Truly lame question, is there any possibility for Amazon or other cloud providers to monitor the executed instructions and their distribution? Could this allow more optimized architectures for specific loads, or would this not bring any actual benefit?

srinikoganti• 8 years ago

This is oversimplification.

Binary compatibility, of millions of third party libraries out there, is the biggest hurdle.

How many years did it take to switch from Python 2.7 to Python 3 ?

AWS lockin is a bigger threat.

I prefer to keep my binaries cloud agnostic and X86 and X64 compatible rather than AWS only code or even ARM binary.

By the way what happened to Amazon phones ?

leowoo91• 8 years ago

What is worrying me more is that we are all stuck on idea of being locked-in to any vendor. Why can't we focus on innovation instead? Take Instagram for e.g. they started with AWS right? Then moved on the real hardware within few weeks (if I remember correctly) after acquisition. I understand, cost of the unseen problems are high, but it might be good idea to remember it also much depends on delivering speed.

StreamBright5• 8 years ago

Not only Amazon's but Apple's, Jiāngnán's as well. I think Intel really should crank up innovation if they would like to stay competitive.

mehdix• 8 years ago

Open source has won the software, however it mostly runs on closed-source and proprietary hardware. Perhaps open hardware is the ultimate answer.

syntaxing• 8 years ago

I thought Amazon is just licensing a custom design from ARM and manufacturing from TSMC. It's a step in the right direction but it'll be a good amount of years before Amazon has their own Fab making their own chips.

tmaly• 8 years ago

As much as it is easy to license from ARM and use TSM as a foundry, it does not make much economic sense.

Look at Google's purchase of Motorola. They ended up selling Motorola to Lenova.

The hardware industry and specifically the chip industry is very specialized. If your code competency is not chip making, it really does not make sense to try to enter the industry.

Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

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