Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/

by damethos • 3 years ago

223 138 3 years ago

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

What exactly happens to old hardware? Is it easily recyclable ?

rvense• 3 years ago

As far as I understand it, electronics are recycled by crushing them and extracting a handful of minerals - e.g. gold, there's more gold in circuit boards than the rocks they dig out of gold mines I've heard.

The rest - which by mass, of course, is something approaching "all of it" - is mostly toxic fibre glass, epoxy and plastic that we don't really know what to do with. It's bad, even before you start talking about all the electricity and heat that was used to turn it into electronics in the first place.

trustingtrust• 3 years ago

toxic fibre glass, epoxy and plastic

I’m guessing there are no environmentally friendly alternatives to these materials than can be easily swapped in factories without much hassle.

fransje26• 3 years ago

Is it easily recyclable ?

And therefore, as a whole, the answer to that is: NO.

r0b1n3• 3 years ago

My significant other worked in a recycling plant. To elaborate on the "rest" and how it is done:

PCBs get delivered, sometimes without big components (coolers, screws/brackets fans removed), but also sometimes with those. They are shredded as a whole, including all soldered components, to a particle size of 2mm. Iron and aluminium are separated magnetically (in case of aluminium with an eddy current separator, iron with a static field). All three components, mostly-iron, mostly-aluminium and the rest are then melted down separately. Adherent plastics, electrolytes, epoxy, etc burn off during this process. Gas and ash are lead through separators that filter out the fly-ash as much as possible, which is buried somewhere as toxic waste, the rest is entered into the atmosphere after cleaning (afaik various liquids to bubble through to wash out soluble chemicals, which are then dried and buried). All three metalllic liquids are then metall alloys of various purities which are then cleaned and separated further by skimming off the slag, adding flux, electrolysis and other chemical separation methods. Most of the "other" fraction is copper, which is the main product overall, other rare metals such as gold occur in far smaller amounts and seemingly add only a little to the overall earnings in the process.

Please note that this is the process used in a relatively new plant in a Western European nation. I guess the "advantage" over the rest of the world is that at least there is a fly-ash separator and exhaust cleaning.

speed_spread• 3 years ago

If by recyclable you meant buying old racks of datacenter servers to reuse elsewhere, even if possible, it's not very practical. Servers are super noisy and may have exotic power requirements.

sgarland• 3 years ago

r/homelab would like a word.

throwaway1542• 3 years ago

While there are probably more modern servers around now than ever before, from browsing serverhunter.com there seem to be a couple of cliffs where older CPUs gets rarer, one at 2017 and one at 2014.

rusteh1• 3 years ago

Amazon has a reuse program for old hardware[1]. Disks will be shredded on-site and then recycled. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/how-aws-data-centers-re...

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

I tried Arm on EC2 but random reboots and hangs sent me back to Intel.

anshargal• 3 years ago

Interesting. I never even considered the instance stability to be a risk when using ARM CPUs on Amazon. Anybody else can share their experience?

minimaul7• 3 years ago

On a mix of Graviton2 and 3 based instances, we’ve found no significant difference between ARM, Intel, and AMD instances for weird problems/instance replacement, etc.

electroly• 3 years ago

Can't corroborate. We have not had any issues with Graviton (mix of r7g and t4g today, previously we used r6g and that was fine too).

j16sdiz3• 3 years ago

My ARM server on EC2 work better than the intel one.

They are low—end, low—load servers, if that matter.

PaywallBuster• 3 years ago

I moved RDS and Elasticache to ARM with no issues for over a year ago

For EC2 only used it for a single instance where I could redeploy the app easier by picking an ARM image

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

I tried Ampere Altra on Hetzner, it was unparallel price/performance wise. But it kept falling into low frequency state (1 GHz on all 80 cores). That's either something in the motherboard or in the processor, couldn't figure it out. Guess not mature enough yet.

fourfour3• 3 years ago

Entirely unsurprising - we know Amazon uses their own ARM CPUs internally for large swathes of AWS infra and services.

None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here.

My employer is moving workloads to ARM on AWS as it’s much better for price/perf, and our shiny new M1/M2 Macs run the same binaries. We’ve had very little issue doing the shift - Amazon Linux and Debian both support ARM well.

Must be really putting a dent in Intel’s data centre sales though.

TheDong• 3 years ago

and our shiny new M1/M2 Macs run the same binaries

Does that mean you're all running asahi linux, or are you somehow running linux elf binaries on macOS?

Or are you using VMs, just like the x86 + docker desktop folks are doing to run the same binaries on their laptops and servers?

minimaul7• 3 years ago

VMs through things like Docker for Mac, in our case.

And yes - it’s exactly the same as you can do if you use x86 servers and dev machines.

It’s just the fact that we can also do this for ARM on hardware that doesn’t suck that makes using ARM in production more practical for us.

aragilar• 3 years ago

asahi linux is only needed if you are running on the bare metal. A VM (which abstracts the hardware) means you can run existing ARM64 binaries.

dikei• 3 years ago

You still need VM to run Linux ELF on macOS, but you don't need to use full-blown emulation like QEMU if the Linux ELF is for AARCH64, unlike when you try to run x86 ELF. It's much faster this way.

mcqueenjordan• 3 years ago

I assume he just meant running binaries compiled for the same ISA / processor architecture.

ignoramous• 3 years ago

None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here.

James Hamilton was adamant AWS build ARM expertise in-house [0] (one which they accelerated by acquiring Annapurna Labs), and he's been proven right [1] despite the obstacles he himself foresaw [2].

[0] On the Origins of AWS Custom Silicon, https://archive.is/4k5ul

[1] Low cost, low power servers for Internet-scale services, https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton_CEMS.p...

[2] AWS Designed Processor: Graviton, https://archive.is/WLFBW

pdpi• 3 years ago

and he's been proven right despite the obstacles he himself foresaw

I wouldn't trust anybody to be right about the benefits of something this big if they don't also foresee the obstacles you'll face to realise those benefits.

picadores• 3 years ago

Smaller dent then selling trampolin patches that take a already sold good and multiply the performance with a factor of 0.75.

adfskghnmionio• 3 years ago

My employer is moving workloads to ARM on AWS as it’s much better for price/perf

It's a fool's errand to try to reason about Amazon's pricing. We don't have figures about how much a Graviton costs to build or to run, but we do know AWS has staggeringly high margins across the board. They have huge headroom to make price cuts if they want their homegrown solution to win.

And perhaps it is better! I have no doubt it's a good CPU. But we can't infer that from pricing.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

It could also be simultaneously true that it's cheaper to rent ARM servers from AWS than it is to rent Intel servers from them, and that AWS makes more money renting you the ARM servers. In fact, given they're developed in house, it might even be likely that the ARM margins are higher for them than their Intel margins.

minimaul7• 3 years ago

Quite right - you can't infer performance from pricing.

We did some assessments of how well our applications ran on ARM and x86 based AWS instances, and quite simply it costs us less to serve the same quantities of end user traffic using Amazon's ARM instances compared to the x86 ones.

tracker13• 3 years ago

I think ARM and AMD both are starting to cut deep into Intel's market share. I do think Ampere is a bit higher priced than I'd be comfortable with if I were setting up servers. The AMD 128-core Zen 4c server chip is very impressive in terms of per-core power use and on par on power usage with ARM even.

Incredible amount of computing capacity per u in the racks at this point on both fronts. Intel is betting on custom accelerators, but I don't know how well that fits on a rental (cloud) model unless you get a full server/cpu.

oefrha• 3 years ago

Article says Amazon accounts for >50% while China accounts for 40%, so Amazon actually has >80% outside China. I wonder why Microsoft and Google aren’t as eager to stop paying the x86 tax.

j16sdiz3• 3 years ago

Google is doing their own server ARM chips: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...

iLoveOncall• 3 years ago

Amazon serves traffic to China, they have an AWS region there I think.

mcbain• 3 years ago

Three. Two operated by other companies (in Beijing and Ningxia) that are only available in China, and Hong Kong which appears to be just another AWS region available globally.

whoevercares• 3 years ago

Very little traffic for AWS China regions

qbasic_forever3• 3 years ago

Microsoft has been abysmally slow to move towards ARM. They hitched their wagon to Qualcomm and snapdragon... which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol). Windows on ARM for servers has been a bit of a pipe dream and joke--I think they finally have it available but I stopped looking or caring about it years ago. Amazon is the defacto ARM in the cloud/server leader right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

snvzz6• 3 years ago

which does not seem like a smart decision now (especially as Qualcomm seems to be moving to RISC-V lol).

I politely disagree. We know for a fact, from December's RISC-V Summit, that Microsoft is influencing RISC-V to ease the burden on their own Windows for RISC-V effort.

Qualcomm was a partner for ARM, and they are already used to working with them. They will likely be partners again, with RISC-V devices this time around.

And Windows for ARM will go the same way as Windows for Alpha. Just an historical footnote.

RISC-V is inevitable.

sgjohnson• 3 years ago

Windows on ARM for servers has been a bit of a pipe dream and joke

Arguably Windows for servers is a joke in itself. What can it do, besides Active Directory and Exchange, that Linux can't?

(I know LDAP exists, but let's not pretend that AD isn't superior in almost every way imaginable)

lizknope2• 3 years ago

They are but it takes 2 to 3 years to develop a chip like this. Someone already posted a link to the Google chip. Microsoft got a lot of CPU designers from Qualcomm's team after Qualcomm got rid of them a few years ago. Now Microsoft has laid off their custom ARM core team so anything they do will be a licensed ARM core.

DeathArrow• 3 years ago

I wonder if Google, Microsoft, Facebook aren't considering using ARM in their datacenters.

j16sdiz3• 3 years ago

Both Google and Microsoft have ARM in their VM offer.

Facebook have been flip-flop’ing on their ARM server: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/146850-facebook-arm-x86-...

skinner927• 3 years ago

That’s a 10 year old article

unnah• 3 years ago

The Register does not report any absolute numbers and the source appears to be a proprietary market research report. Is the actual number of ARM or x86 CPUs at Amazon publically available?

throwaway1542• 3 years ago

If Amazon's heralding something more general, I'm curious what a move to ARM will do to server side async and sync/async trade-off with waiting tasks/io. Less potential point if 20 threads/cores can be had for the price of 1?

Or, what they've changed to take advantage of the difference.

Koala_ice• 3 years ago

The new HPC Graviton3E instances (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/hpc7g/) are pretty great for CFD and simulation workloads.

dijit• 3 years ago

I don't doubt it, as a private individual buying Ampere Altra CPU's has been pretty painful -- at least in Europe.

I could only buy 4 in the end.

Sidenote: has anyone noticed that there's no price difference for GCP to use ARM?

fortran77• 3 years ago

I got an ARM Windows 11 laptop (Lenovo X13s) because I wanted a lightweight travel laptop with long batter life. I was expecting a big compromise, but it's actually wonderful!

I'm a giant Intel fanboy, but I think they have a real challenge here.

acdha8• 3 years ago

Intel definitely has a challenge – having gone through both of Apple’s PowerPC migrations, this was the smoothest yet because we’re in a much better place with open source software dominating and internet distribution being the norm. I remember things being held up by proprietary compilers or needing to port hand rolled assembly but this time around we’re using higher level languages & frameworks a lot more and it’s been mostly transparent. Similarly, back then getting hardware to build and test was a chore; now it’s a checkbox in the EC2 launch options.

Thinking about it, I knew that Intel not landing the first iPhone contract was a big loss on mobile but I don’t think anyone expected it to savage their traditional strongholds like this because that paved the way for so many tools not just being ported but heavily optimized for ARM. They’re certainly still doing a ton of business but now there’s a cap on how much profit they can take even if AMD completely founders.

seltzered_2• 3 years ago

The funny thing is that roughly a decade ago AMD literally was prototyping an ARM CPU presumably for server use. I recall hearing about

2014 - AMD Opteron A1100: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.anandtech.com/show/...

The startup Calxeda (2008-2013) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda

Intel also had the 'xscale' ARM chips back in the late 2000s

qwytw10• 3 years ago

I knew that Intel not landing the first iPhone contract was a big loss on mobile

Funnily enough Intel also had the best/most competitive ARM cores with XScale in the early 2000s which seemed like the default option for most high-end devices at the time. I wouldn't have been surprised if Apple would've just went with that (even if not x86) if Intel hadn't decided to can it without actually having any viable x86 SoC to replace it...

sneak• 3 years ago

I wonder how many Apple are using for ML and related server stuff.

Jgrubb• 3 years ago

If siri is any indication, not many.

ant6n• 3 years ago

…also their atoxischste

Edit: I mean auto complete

boristane• 3 years ago

Graviton server and serverless functions have shown such a better performance to cost ratio, it's unsurprising Amazon is doubling down on those.

The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips?

zokier• 3 years ago

The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips?

I suspect the answer is simple; they are nowhere near as flush with cash to buy up a CPU company and invest years to make their own chips. It's no small endeavor that AWS has gone through to get here.

acdha8• 3 years ago

Not just cash but also willing to make investments which don’t show returns within a year. Amazon has a history of very lean profits due to reinvestment and something like this might not be possible with Google’s promotion culture, especially adoption takes time so the initial numbers won’t be compelling.

jsnell2• 3 years ago

Microsoft and Google are far more flush with cash than Amazon is. Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades.

Here's an alternative equally simple explanation: ARM doesn't actually have anywhere near the level of advantage in perf/$ that Amazon's pricing would imply. The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons.

mabbo• 3 years ago

I'm sure they are. But Amazon has a multi year lead.

Amazon took a gamble on server ARM chips. Not a bad or blind gamble, but they had no idea if their customers would take to them at all. I'm sure if they hadn't, we'd all be sitting here saying what an obviously dumb waste of money.

klysm3• 3 years ago

AWS has a massive economic hand in ARM support. By offering cheaper compute on the ARM platform, they gave enough reason for everybody to make things work on ARM. I think they had a pretty good idea that customers would make it work for the price

torginus• 3 years ago

Do they? My experience is that they cost somewhat less, and are somewhat slower than the Intel competition. Their price/perf advantage is mostly in synthetic benchmarks, IRL the difference is much less pronounced.

lokar• 3 years ago

We found a big improvement and are moving a very large footprint over.

qwytw10• 3 years ago

So far they seem to be betting on Ampere which seems to be developing their own cores (which is much more complex/expensive than what Amazon is doing) so it's interesting how they will do. If Ampere manages to get a moat AWS might end up behind everyone else in a couple of years.

snvzz6• 3 years ago

That's gonna be fun when Amazon switches to RISC-V for their next (or next+n) iteration of Graviton.

ARM presence in the server market will go away like poof. More than half of it.

ukuina• 3 years ago

What indication exists that Amazon is considering RISC?

geerlingguy• 3 years ago

None, currently.

klysm3• 3 years ago

It’s mere existence. If Amazon isn’t considering it I’d be surprised.

221qqwe2• 3 years ago

Well it's certainly going to be fun for their competitors when Amazon ends up being 5-10 years behind AMD/Intel/Ampere when they do that.

x-complexity• 3 years ago

That's gonna be fun when Amazon switches to RISC-V for their next (or next+n) iteration of Graviton.
ARM presence in the server market will go away like poof. More than half of it.

This is a borderline fetishistic delusion to think that this could happen immediately in the first place. The changeover from x86/64 to ARM for AWS customers didn't even go this fast, and that's WITH the help & stability provided by the extensive tooling & ecosystem around ARM.

RISC-V is nowhere near to being able to provide the same sort of tooling for years to come, and this comes from someone that loves the architecture's openness.

varispeed• 3 years ago

Time to change the name to Armazon.

anagri• 3 years ago

The X86 vs ARM makes for such a great story.

One prefers locking and complicated instructions, the other is designed with open and simplicity.

At one point, Intel seemed to be dominant, and proven right with their proprietary tech, where as ARM chugged along keeping a low profile, and keep doing the good work. Now, finally the reality has caught up with them, and turns out openness and simplicity is finally taking a lead.

Stick to your principles FTW!!!

fluoridation• 3 years ago

Pretty sure ARM is proprietary.

imtringued• 3 years ago

I don't think it can get more proprietary than running your code on a machine that isn't accessible to the general public.

tacker2000• 3 years ago

How is ARM open? And simplicity is also subjective… x86 goes way back thats why it seems more complicated or “crufty”.

ARM is a huge corp like anyone else.

ARM got a huge boost now since everything is switching to mobile and their chips are more energy efficient than Intels. Added to that Intel was also asleep at the wheel and missed the mobile boat…

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

ARM chips are more energy efficient because they're simpler. Less gates/instructions = less power usage.

snvzz6• 3 years ago

One prefers locking and complicated instructions, the other is designed with open and simplicity.

It seems you're confusing ARM and RISC-V here.

ARM isn't simple, nor open.

sam_goody• 3 years ago

Why would Amazon develop a custom Arm chip and not RISC-V?

Don't they have to pay a fee to Arm for this, even though it is being developed by them?

And would Google (which is allegedly developing their own Arm Chip) and Apple (which also has their own chip) not also benefit from backing Risc-V as well?

I have not been able to get clear in my head the relationship between Risc-V and Arm, and even more so exactly what responsibility down stream each user has.

Would appreciate the some ELI5 from knowledgeable HNers.

---

Slightly related: is it more or less a given that eventually no one will use x64 chips (since Arm/Risc-V is more efficient)?

If not for servers, is it at least a given for desktop computers, as more software is written for ARM, and re-compilers like Rosseta improve?

If so, I know that Intel is investing in RISC-V, but has AMD given up the space entirely?

acegopher• 3 years ago

Because by paying a fee to Arm, they get decades of architecture experience, support, peripherals (including a well-thought-out internal BUS), etc.

RISC-V has a good ISA, but there currently isn't a lot of silicon experience in the real world (relative to Arm and Intel, for example). And Amazon isn't going to roll their own to that degree. It's not worth the meager licensing costs.

It's like the difference between deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Arch Linux. Each has it's place, but right now its advantages are in much different areas.

minimaul7• 3 years ago

The most common use case is where ARM provide fully functional CPU core IP that you can put into your own SoC - in AWS Graviton's case that seems to be the ARM Neoverse line of cores.

You can also get architecture licenses where you can implement your own CPU core (from scratch, or by making tweaks to an ARM design) - Apple has one of these, but Apple is a special case in that they were one of the original partners when ARM was originally founded in 1990.

RISC-V on the other hand is an architecture that is open for anyone to implement, but the RISC-V foundation doesn't sell you a core design - you need to create your own, or find a partner to sell you one. It's also much newer, so there's less of an ecosystem around it compared to ARM.

221qqwe2• 3 years ago

Don't they have to pay a fee to Arm for this

Because it's way cheaper than to do everything ARM provides on your own?

Gravitron3 is just using ARM Neoverse-V1 (which AFAIK are years ahead of any RISC-V cores). So they aren't different from Qualcomm/Ampere have been doing so far.

I think Ampere is planning to release a CPU with their own custom cores in the near future though. It's interesting whether Amazon will follow suite or not. It would be very bizarre if they tried switching to RISC-V in the near future though (I do find this semi -fanatical obsession with RISC-V a bit fascinating though but I don't think it's shared by many large corporations outside China..)

ac29• 3 years ago

Why would Amazon develop a custom Arm chip and not RISC-V?

The first Graviton was launched in 2018, which means it was in development and manufacturing even earlier. You couldn't build a high performance RISC-V chip back then. Even in 2023, RISC-V is significantly behind ARM/x86 in performance and software support isnt great either (for example, Debian has supported Arm for over a decade, but RISC-V support only arrived a few weeks ago).

nuc1e0n• 3 years ago

What would a CPU instruction set look like to minimise energy costs for server workloads? And do spinning hard drives use more energy than SSDs?

bluedino• 3 years ago

Where are people (that aren't Amazon) buying ARM servers to put in their datacenters? They seem hard to find or actually order.

lizknope2• 3 years ago

The big hyperscale datacenter companies either design it themselves or partner with another large semiconductor company to help them design it for their particular needs.

These companies are not interested in selling to small companies that just want 1 to 100 machines. The only company that might is Ampere.

https://www.asacomputers.com/arm-servers.html

Oracle is using the ARM server chip from Ampere but they would be buying tens of thousands or more and getting volume discount pricing. I've heard rumors that Ampere customized their chip for Oracle's needs.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/

Qualcomm was designing an ARM server chip about 8 years ago but killed the project. Most of those engineers went to Microsoft and now ARM itself.

I've heard stories about Chinese hyperscale datacenters wanting to design their own ARM servers but I haven't heard anything in a while.

pulketo• 3 years ago

What could go wrong?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp

perryizgr8• 3 years ago

Is there any scientific comparison between AWS amd64 and arm instances for performance and cost? I tried running some stuff on an arm instance but it seemed to similar in both price and performance to amd64. Just with added complexity to make it work nicely with Github actions built container images.

rkagerer• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity is the timing of this Bernstein Research report and the upcoming Arm IPO a coincidence?

Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world

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