Green with NVMe: AWS adds more Arm-powered instance types

Amazon Web Services has created three more EC2 instance types that run its home-grown Graviton2 Arm-compatible processors. The new instances are variants of the M6g, R6g, and C6g instances that the cloud colossus currently offers for general-purpose compute, memory-intensive applications, and compute-intensive workloads, …

[Malcolm Weir]

What's "Arm compatible" mean?

The first sentence has a weird phrase, "Arm-compatible". What's that mean... there have been many ARM micro-architectures, and of course the 32/64 bit evolution, but surely a CPU licensed from ARM Holdings is not so much "Arm-compatible" as, you know, and actual Arm CPU. And the Amazon Graviton2 is a licensed Arm Neoverse CPU, in exactly the same way as the Apple things are and the Samsung Exynos processors, so why not simply call it a home-grown Graviton2 Arm processor, because that is what it is!

[FIA]

Re: What's "Arm compatible" mean?

The first sentence has a weird phrase, "Arm-compatible". What's that mean... there have been many ARM micro-architectures

Also, without knowing the version of the ABI, or what coprocessor features are present (NEON for example) it's very hard to say.... Look at the work RISC OS has to do to keep up with various different flavours of ARM SoCs, and they're just concerned with 32bit, not 64.

And the Amazon Graviton2 is a licensed Arm Neoverse CPU, in exactly the same way as the Apple things are and the Samsung Exynos processors

Pedant: Samsung yes, Apple no. Apple and Qualcomm have architecture licences and design their own CPU cores from scratch (eg, 'Thunder' and 'Lightening' from Apple, or 'Krait' and 'Kryo' from Qualcomm), rather than using an Arm designed core and adding the rest like core licencees do. (Samsung, Amazon, et al.)

[Anoymous Coward]

A Stone that Shatters Windows

Could lumps of silicone such as these be the stones that shatter Windows.

It is too early to tell yet, but could the future of x86 lie in leccy slurping legacy servers as the world moves to more efficient 5nm (then 3nm) 'nix kit.

[Korev]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

Windows can run on ARM too...

In the past it ran on Alpha etc. too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

That DEC Alpha version of NT also included a translator (FX!32) that allowed you to execute x86 binaries on them. That translator was really useful since almost nobody bothered to port their apps over to Alpha.

I imagine that any major shift from x86 to ARM today in the laptop and server market would probably rely on a translator a whole lot less than Alpha owners did 20+ years ago. There is a whole lot less hand written assembly than there used to be and the tools for compiling cross-processor code is so much better.

With Apple making the shift and with the market rather unimpressed with Intel's attempt at a big.LITTLE-like processor, I wouldn't be surprised if the levee breaks and Windows on ARM moves beyond being a niche product.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

Think before you ink

The only lumps of silicone I know of are in US porn stars chests.

[HildyJ]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

Make American Breasts Great Again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

Arm will out live windows, even after windows becomes yet another shell on Linux.

[Glen 1]

Re: A Stone that Shatters Windows

*Desktop Environment