AWS unveils Graviton4 & Trainium2

https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/11/aws-unveils-next-generation-aws-designed-chips

by skilled • 3 years ago

90 59 3 years ago

press.aboutamazon.com

fhub• 3 years ago

Not much to discuss until there is pricing. I have a bunch of Graviton2 instances that didn't make sense to upgrade to any Graviton3 instances due to pricing bump for 16GB 4 cores (t4g.xlarge).

monlockandkey2• 3 years ago

What Arm core is Graviton 4 using? 30% performance uplift is a good amount

cherioo• 3 years ago

Likely Neoverse V2 architecture, based on A710 cores

monlockandkey2• 3 years ago

Isn't it based on Cortex X3?

aeyes• 3 years ago

Neoverse V2

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-preview-for-new-me...

PedroBatista• 3 years ago

What happens to old&used Graviton 3 chips?

At least in the "old days" there was ( still is ) a secondary market for used server parts..

Don't know how companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google would frame a question like this so their "green" narratives wouldn't be hurt but I'm sure they'll do an excellent job.

rstupek• 3 years ago

They'll continue to run in their datacenter since they're still basically brand new?

baz00• 3 years ago

They're still running prehistoric Intel Xeons. I'm sure they'll just rot slowly until the instances fail.

jamesfinlayson3• 3 years ago

This - I've been seeing recent Fargate workloads mysteriously scaling due to high CPU even though there's no traffic. I started logging the CPU as part of task start-up and I've seen five year old Xeons running my workloads.

threeseed• 3 years ago

As a user you don't get much visibility into the specs of managed services e.g. DynamoDB.

So that's an obvious home for the chips that are no longer available to users.

asperous• 3 years ago

If you haven't used aws a lot then you might not know this but the old instance types stick around and you can still use them, especially as "spot" which lets you bid for server time.

I had a science project which was cpu bound and it turns out because people bid based on the performance, the old chips end up costing the same in terms of cpu work done/$ (older chips cost less per hr but do less).

aws though was by far the most expensive so switching to like oracle with their ampere arm was a lot cheaper for me.

discodave• 3 years ago

They just... don't retire them? The most expensive thing in a DC is the chips, so it's worth it to just build more datacenter space and keep the old ones around.

In 2019, before I left the EC2 Networking / VPC team, we were using M3 instances for our internal services... those machines were probably installed in 2013 or 2014, making them over 5 years old.

With the slowdown in Moore's law and chip speeds, I'd wager that team is still using those M3s now.

Eventually the machines actually start failing, so they need to be retired, but a large portion of machines likely make it to 10 years.

temp0826• 3 years ago

They for sure can find a use internally for them. Hat-tip to the less-shiny teams like glacier that have to endlessly put out fires on dilapidated old s3 compute/array handmedowns.

aurareturn2• 3 years ago

Isn't the most expensive thing power and cooling?

IE. if you replace the 5 year old Xeons with new ultra-efficient ARM chips, wouldn't that save you more power and cooling over x amount of time?

Genuine question.

whalesalad• 3 years ago

I can't wait to find old surplus custom ARM silicon from this period at the recycler or on eBay.

As a kid I always wanted one of those yellow google search appliances and now you can find them everywhere being used as like lawn ornaments.

cjsplat• 3 years ago

Depending on the numbers involved, previous generation hardware can waterfall to infrastructure apps that are throughput based.

Things accessed through network APIs and billed per op or in aggregate. Distributed file systems, databases, even build and regression suite systems.

Another key point is that older generations of servers for full custom cloud environments tend to co-evolve with their environments. The amount of power and cooling for a rack may not support a modern deployment.

Especially if a generation lasts 6 years. You might be able to cascade gen N+1 to N, but N+6 may require a full retrofit. A 6 year old data center that is partially filled as individual servers fail may justify waiting for N+7 or even 8 to cover the cost of the downtime and retrofit.

There is a reason Google announced that they are depreciating servers over 6 years and Meta is at 5 years, vs the old accounting standard of 3 years.

Then of course there is a secondary market for memory and standard PCI cards, but the market for 6 year old tech is mainly spares, so it is unlikely to absorb the full size of the N-6 year data center build.

If you are considering a refurb style resale market for 6 year old tech, it is often the case that the performance per dollar is a non-starter because of the amount of power the older tech consumes.

aseipp3• 3 years ago

They don't sell these. They reuse them and perform maintenance on them until their last breath and part them out once they die.

Hyperscalers design their own datacenter "SKUs" for storage/compute, all the way from power delivery to networking to chassis. These servers are going to be heavily customized and it's unlikely that even if they fit normal form factors that they will work in the same way as COTS devices or things you would buy from Supermicro.

You could possibly make it work. If they sold them. But they don't, and if you're in the market for that stuff, Supermicro will just design it for you anyway, because presumably you have actual money.

And the reality is they're probably either break even or greener doing it this way, as opposed to washing their hands of it and selling servers on Ebay so they can eventually get throw in landfills wholesale by nerds once their startups fail or they get bored of them. Just because you stick your head in the sand doesn't mean it doesn't end up in a landfill.

stingraycharles2• 3 years ago

I haven’t heard about CPUs failing that often, though. Usually it’s some other part of the server that dies, like the motherboard. In that light, the grandparent’s question is still valid — normally these servers that “died” would be torn apart and the non-broken parts refurbished and resold on the aftermarket.

Is AWS doing that?

buildbot7• 3 years ago

The scale they are quoting at 100,000 chip clusters and 65 exaflops seems impossible. At 800W per chip, that's 80MW of power! Unless they literally built an entire DC of these things, nobody is training anything on the entire cluster at once. It's probably 10-20 separate datacenters being combined for marketing reasons here.

tempay3• 3 years ago

What makes you think it's 800W per chip?

buildbot7• 3 years ago

It's about what the I though the H100 was, that's 700W actually. But even at say, 400W, that's 40MW of power. I guess some datacenters are built in the 40-100MW range from some quick googling, but I really doubt they actually can network 100,000 chips together in any sort of performant way, that's supercomputer level interconnect. I don't think most datacenters support highly interlinked network interconnect like this would need either.

bluedino2• 3 years ago

Per server? Our dual CPU intel servers take about 800-900W at full power

bradknowles2• 3 years ago

Well, think of it this way -- individual 1U servers can easily consume 1000W, or 1kW. Put about forty of those in a single rack, and that's 40kW. Divide 80MW for the datacenter by 40kW per rack and that's not very many racks to comprise the entire datacenter, right?

buildbot7• 3 years ago

That’s still 2000 racks, that’s not nothing?

LunaSea• 3 years ago

Since Graviton3 still isn't available in most regions, especially on the RDS side, I'm really not holding my breath.

ilaksh• 3 years ago

Do you need specific software to train a model using Trainium2? For example, what about fine-tuning a language model? Will something like QLoRA work?

snewman2• 3 years ago

Graviton4 processors deliver up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than Graviton3.

This seems ambiguous. Presumably this is 50% more cores per chip. What about "30% better compute performance" and "75% more memory bandwidth": is that per core, or per chip? If the latter, then per-core compute performance would actually be lower.

Also, "up to" could be hiding almost anything. Has anyone seen a source with clearer information as to how per-core application performance compares to earlier Graviton generations?

p1esk• 3 years ago

Wait, how could "50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth" result in anything less than 50% of better compute performance?

jagger27• 3 years ago

Clock speed

snewman2• 3 years ago

Because AWS doesn't rent you chips, it rents you cores. If a chip has 50% more cores, that doesn't help you as a renter of cores, just means they get to rent out more cores.

Of course it might give Amazon room to offer these instances at a lower hourly rate per core, which would ultimately cash out as improved cost/performance for AWS customers.

bluedino2• 3 years ago

It's the best Graviton processor yet!

kevincox• 3 years ago

I would assume that "up to" means that for all of the workloads that they benchmarked the best result was 30% better compute performance. Not a very useful number as your workload is very unlikely to hit the right set of requirements to see that uplift.

otterley• 3 years ago

AWS Graviton specialist here!

The performance improvement is on a per-core basis. The pending availability of 96-vCPU Graviton4 instances is icing on the cake!

Klasiaster• 3 years ago

Do any of the (soon-to-be) available non-metal offers support nested virt?

stingraycharles2• 3 years ago

I read it as: each core is 30% faster, each chip has 50% more cores, and each chip has 75% more memory bandwidth.

But you’re right it is ambiguous.

aseipp3• 3 years ago

Neoverse V2, so this will be probably be the first widely available ARMv9 server with SVE2, a server-class SKU you can actually get your hands on (i.e. not a mobile phone/Grace/Fugaku.) It's about damn time!

ksec• 3 years ago

It is interesting how late the Cortex X3, ( Neoverse V3 or Graviton 4 ) arrives on server when the X4 is already being used and close to shipping in millions within months or weeks.

End of Next Year we will get 128 Core Neoverse V4 / Cortex X4 with 3nm. And 3nm Zen 5 EPYC.

Server CPU Market is getting quite exciting.

snird• 3 years ago

One of the employees in the team developing Graviton4 is kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza: https://www-geektime-co-il.translate.goog/amazon-aws-employe...

insanitybit• 3 years ago

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ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

It feels a bit weird with MS, AWS probably other cloud owners develop their own CPUS and AI oriented chips and telling the world about the specs.

Yet nobody will ever get noe to play with them in RL. I cant hope to buy one a year from now and stuff it in my home office.

What will all this mean for consumer oriented cpus?

Would it be accurate to say that Intel funds part of the development of consumer cpus with the server cpus? (or is it the other way around). It seems like Xeon chip advances drip downwards after a while.

If AWS and Azure stop buying chips from Intel and AMD, presumably that woud be interesting.

resters• 3 years ago

In my opinion the key takeaway is that compute is becoming commoditized much more rapidly than anyone expected, and that IP is becoming less and less relevant compared to fabrication, energy and land. For consumers of cloud infrastructure, there is little concern how many teraflops per cubic meter or per watt hour other than very locality-specific edge use-cases.

Laptops and phones are are already a SoC with IO in a particular form factor, and sever farms will go in the same direction with minor differences in the energy or rack density that come out in the wash.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Any guesses what the various chips on the package are?

I'd guess maybe the two directly abutting the core are memory controllers, but maybe they are the stacked memory? Maybe the top and bottom chips are io controllers? It felt like destiny that eventually Nitro was going to be on-package, maybe those are basically big honking nitro-like chips?

AWS unveils Graviton4 & Trainium2

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