Amazon Has More Than Half of All Arm Server CPUs in the World (theregister.com) 19
Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs. From a report: This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier. But that total is beaten by just one company -- Amazon -- which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst.
Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.
Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.
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Not falling for this again (Score:2)
> a report issued by Bernstein Research
20 years from now it will be referred to as Bernstain Research and everyone who swears it was Bernstein Research will find all evidence wiped from the internet.
Re: Not falling for this again (Score:2)
Ya, but ... (Score:3)
Amazon Has More Than Half of All Arm Server CPUs in the World
Who has all the "Leg" and/or "Hammer" CPUs? Not Amazon. Checkmate. :-)
Microsoft already sells ARM-based Windows laptops. (Score:2)
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Just about everything you can think of to optimize the ARM architecture for servers has already been implemented in this design, and more.
It's about time that cloud computing has embraced efficient RISC architectures. This architecture was released in 2018 and keeps getting better.
I wonder where Azure is?
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It's a complicated subject, but these days Ryzen has actually pretty competitive with high end ARM chips like Apple M2 for performance/Watt.
Basically technologies that improve performance also tend to increase energy consumption. Additional cache memory, out of order execution, speculative execution, hyperthreading, it all adds up. The main difference between performance and efficiency cores is that the efficiency ones lack those things, and have a shorter instruction pipeline and fewer ALUs too.
It becomes
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There are a few other reasons why ARM is popular in data center tasks, including those that are targeted at performance. The easiest to explain is vcpus.
On AMD/Intel, 1 vcpu = 1 hyperthread (to oversimplify, 1/2 core)
On ARM, 1 vcpu = 1 core
Even if the ARM system is only 80% as fast on a per-core basis, having twice the core count on a similar class instance makes the overall cost much lower.
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Whilst ARM Surface laptops don't perform as well as x86 Surface laptops, over on the other side of the fence, Apple Silicon (ARM) based laptops absolutely smoke equivalent x86 laptops.
ARM doesn't just mean low power, it means more instructions per watt, which is important for energy efficiency. In a datacenter, this is important to pack more processing into the same amount of space and not need more power delivery or cooling.
Re:Microsoft already sells ARM-based Windows lapto (Score:4, Informative)
Apple Silicon (ARM) based laptops absolutely smoke equivalent x86 laptops.
Do they?
https://www.phoronix.com/revie... [phoronix.com]
Latest results say it's much more mixed. An AMD handheld consistently beats the macbook air in benchmarks. And before you ask, Asahi Linux has been beating OSX in CPU an disk related benchmarks because Linux r00lz darwin dr00lz etc.
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Some recent study (sorry, don't have a link) concluded that as more modern-day performance optimizations are applied (process node, many-stage pipelines, advanced branch prediction, caches, out-of-order execution, instruction level parallelism, etc etc what have you), the less relevant a software-presented ISA becomes. That is: ISA's tend to converge for high-performance parts.
So you can have a few cores with high single-thread performance, or lower-performance cores but more of them. You can have a high
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And it's not like price isn't a factor. Apple chips might have wonderful performance, but is it really so much better than current-generation x86 stuff to justify the premium cost of an Apple laptop? (For me it was, combined with several other reasons, but it certainly won't be for everybody.)
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Last time I sucked, the performance of ARM Surface laptops sucked in comparison to X86 based Surface laptops, but I suspect they use less power. I'm thinking battery life and I/O bandwidth is becoming more important the CPU cycles per second these days anyway, especially for servers. For a server, you want every CPU sharing a huge shared memory space, so the limiting factor on performance is bus contention.
Most ARM chips are deployed as system on chip (SoC) packages that contain multiple, integrated components. Increasingly, this includes not just CPU cores but also vector processors and cores specialized for applications like AI. I'm sure Amazon's ARM servers don't suck, performance-wise, and power consumption is even more of an issue in a massive-scale data center as in a laptop.
That's Where (Score:4, Funny)
Re: That's Where (Score:2)
Those are totally different chips on totally different hardware.
It would be cool to be able to rent a raspberry pi as a dedicated server though, they are more than powerful enough for small websites, dns and mail servers, etc.