AWS is bursting with pride for its Arm CPU cores – so much it’s put them behind a burstable instance type

Amazon Web Services has found another use for its home-brewed Graviton2 Arm processors: powering an instance type designed for burstable performance. Most instance types in Amazon’s EC2 service define a server with particular specifications. The T3 instance type instead offers servers with a baseline level of CPU performance, …

[Yoyo95]

Just one question

For Intel, Is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just one question

Or just another chapter in the long lore of the Arm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just one question

You mean Nvidia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, the missing ingredient

ARM servers in the datacenter are not going to be a Thing until there is a sufficiently common systems architecture that important software can be portable between different vendors' implementations without a massive conversion and optimization effort. Compare for example AWS ARM instances and the Fujitsu ARM compute nodes. The market today is a lot like the desktop computer world before the IBM PC (which, incidentally, is the direct ancestor of the Lintel server of today). Contrast the rapid adoption of GPUs for compute, which is facilitated enormously by Nvidia driving a standardized API across a broad range of cards.

The worst case scenario for ARM servers is that the market remains an archipelago of incompatible implementations. The second worst is that AWS ARM instances become the de facto standard by sheer weight of market presence, and everybody else is left trying to "do what AWS does" by inspection, much like S3.

[matjaggard]

Re: Still, the missing ingredient

But for these types of workload, nobody cares as long as you can run Java, Python, NodeJS or Apache surely?

[Jon F]

Re: Still, the missing ingredient

We migrated our Java app from c5 to c6g, comparable performance and 20% cheaper. There is also a c6g.medium - previously you had to start with a large instance so potentially a 60% saving there!

[Bob H]

Re: Still, the missing ingredient

I have to agree, almost none of our cloud-centric developers are writing code that is compiled anymore and those few that are, are usually doing it in Java.

With the rise of "serverless", nodejs and python it's clear that not much is needed to be compiled. Yes, Rust still needs to target a platform but with LLVM intermediates you aren't talking about a major risk when writing.

[Anonymous Coward]

SBSA solves that (was Re: Still, the missing ingredient)

Arm recommends that Arm server vendors all stick to the Arm SBSA == Server Base System Architecture which should completely eliminate the "massive conversion and optimization effort" that you talk about.

From the Wikipedia page:

"The SBSA seeks to strengthen the ARM ecosystem by specifying a minimal set of standardized features so that an OS built for this standard platform should function correctly without modification on all hardware products compliant with the specification."

"Initial public version of the SBSA was announced on January 29, 2014."

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SBSA solves that (was Still, the missing ingredient)

SBSA is the right direction, but it doesn't have the adoption it needs to make the difference.

[AJ_Newman]

This bodes well for the ARM ecosystem.

For each enterprise system that tunes their apps for more cores - and moves to more cost effective (burstable) systems - Amazon will continue to polish the stack and fill in missing holes in their offering.

(speculation) In 20 months - a Graviton 3 on TSMC 3nm - perhaps with some Nvidia ML IP blocks could provide Intel with more than just a headache.

AJ