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Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

> The rational for purchasing Arm seems ridiculous to many, but Jensen’s vision is for the datacenter being a computer and Nvidia being the one to build it.

The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They can move the industry to RISC-V if NVidia doesn't play ball, or convince Intel to manufacture on TSMC's process.

Nvidia won't be in a particularly strong negotiating position. My understanding is that lots of ARM licenses are perpetual, or very broad. The existing players can just keep making ARM chips, what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions?

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> what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions?

I don't know what those perpetual licenses look like, but, if there are any strings attached at all, perhaps Nvidia can tug on them in order to apply a little good old-fashioned embrace-extend-extinguish to ARM? Extend ARM with new instructions that offer performance improvements when you've bought 100% into Nvidia hardware, maybe, and then stifle competition by making them implement these features in order to claim ARM compatibility, thereby making it more difficult/expensive for anyone else to pair ARM CPUs with other companies' GPUs?

In a string-tugging fight between AWS and ARM, you'd bet on ARM?

I don't see a fight between AWS and ARM as a realistic scenario. In The Great British Bake-Off, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood were competing against neither the contestants nor the baking challenges. Their involvement was defining the scoring rubric and selecting the winners.

Similarly, AWS is in competition with nobody in this context. AWS just influences the competitive landscape and chooses who wins by awarding contracts.

China is having issues with Arm and has a strategic view to develop its domestic industry. This alone means that a significant challenger to Arm will rise.

China is heavily investing in RISC-V. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that their challenger will use a RISC-V ISA.

Interesting point, I don't believe I've heard about Chinese ARM processor, but I do know that China has MIPS based processors, and they're using VIAs license to build x86 chips.

There was a drama at ARM China recently. The fired, but de-jure still acting CEO was caught self dealing with his own obscure fund company, some times with clients' assistance.

IMHO, it simply looked like he was was quietly moving out cash from the company.

Well, China has Rockchip and HiSillicon, although HiSillicon lost the right to manufacture in TSMC sometimes ago. Not only VIA, both Intel and AMD has joint venture in China to produce homegrown Chinese x86 chips.

It took Arm 20 years to achieve current success with substantial inroads into networking, mobile, automotive, servers (AWS & others) and desktops (Apple Silicon imminent). This is not the time to give up and start over. There are society-wide opportunity costs.

> The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

The are big players in Internet business, but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips. Even if they will be all combined, they will not be even a double digit of top tier Xeon buyers.

And this is partly the reason why AMD was so keen on playing ball with them. AMD among other things was making a proprietary CPU for Amazon, which the later discarded. It was later rebranded Seattle, and thrown on the open market.

> but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips.

AWS Graviton 2 (Arm) would like a word about that with you. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

I bet they will eventually wrap it up, as they can't keep up with AMD, and Intel RnD, and given the restarting of competition in X86, and thus falling prices.

Pretty much the only way they could've done that economically, in relative terms, was at the time of obscenely high prices on high core count xeons.

Part of being in the top half of the s curve that is Moore's law is that CPU cores, even high performance ones, become a commodity. Historically, designing high perf cores required a huge capital investment on a short time frame in order to take advantage of each node. As the difference in nodes slows, that gives more breathing room for other companies and even open source to create competitive cores for a given gate count.

Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever.

>Also, the x86_64 patents don't last forever.

No, but Intel and AMD have a decent reason to work together to create new key feature additions to x86 that can be newly patented. FMA is under patent for 6 more years. AVX2 is 12 more years. AVX512 another 15.

Won't keep up in what way? Graviton2 is already better for some use cases. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...

ARM's got a lot of development effort as a whole, and they're getting very competitive performance-wise. They're also not hindered in having to be compatible with the 8088.

My take on this is that the Graviton stuff exists to solve the Catch-22 problem: AWS wants you running ARM stuff, so they need to provide an ARM platform for you to do it on. Current suppliers may not be providing anything cloudy enough from the enterprise management side of things, so AWS might have to roll their own for now.

Once the ball is rolling, they can get 3rd party ARM chips or full servers in and stop with their own development on that side if they want to.

Amazon has been putting their own chips into systems for years, after they bought Annapurna Labs - they have hardware virtualisation support in their network and storage chips, and now their own CPU. This does not seem to be a short-term tactic.

You think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google taken together are not a major customer of Intel? That's preposterous. I bet they are #1, #2, and #3 buyers of Xeon CPUs taken individually.

They might not be #1, #2 and #3, but they're certainly in the top 7 (there's also Facebook and the three huge Chinese internet companies). It's well known that those companies (sometimes called the 'Super Seven') account for a majority of Intel's datacenter revenue.

Super Seven is a new term for me.

And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually. Only this way such volume discounts were realised.

If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM.

> And they buy them in servers from OEMs who volume buy even bigger number of chip than any of them individually.

No, they build their own servers. They definitely aren't racking Dell or HP servers.

Even Amazon's x86 based servers are extremely custom. That whole "Nitro" system isn't exactly a USB stick, and AWS is often using customized variants of Intel processors in their servers.

Let me repeat that: Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS.

> If they were buying directly, Intel would have even more leverage to milk them, than if they stood behind the back of some beefy OEM.

That's not how bulk buying works... at all.

The scale of AWS is so much larger than you seem to think it is.

> Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS

Sort of. It's the same mask for everyone with the per customer special features either fused off, or just requiring a special MSR knock sequence.

That’s an implementation detail — an optimization on Intel’s side of things. It’s the same effect either way, and I can’t just ask Intel to customize their processors for me.

AWS operates at a large enough scale that they do exactly that, and AWS already purchases directly from Intel, both of which are my main points. Baybal2 doesn’t seem to be aware of either of these facts based on their comment.

Well, the thing is, it doesn't seem to be really customer specific feature.

An option to fuse an individual performance profile, or few more ME features doesn't amount to be something really custom.

It's real custom silicon on the masks; it's not a binning thing. What I've mainly heard of is custom system integration glue for their boards.

Even if that it is, it must be something really small. It's hard to believe for me that they will put even a square millimetre of effectively dead silicon onto xeon for <10% of their sales.

You're basically admitting that you don't know much about these parts of the datacenter industry, but you keep posting comments authoritatively like you do.

Why can't you just ask questions instead of misleading people?

I'm just curious so ask you a question, what's the special feature on Intel processor for AWS? I had imagined something like special turbo-boost parameter to avoid performance hit.

I'm not sure how authoritative other commenter are, but I would be very surprised that Intel was going so far to accommodate them beyond fusing perf profile/ME feature/or some small IP block.

With my knowledge of their sales tactic, I would imagine Intel could've simply said "You are free to buy AMD," with full knowledge that just few years ago their clients had no other option than coming back to them eventually.

Why? Particularly when the practicalities of layout, particularly around the uncore area, mean there's some free space anyway. Also, a square millimeter is around 30-40 million transistors on TSMC 7nm (about Pentium III level gate count), which is almost certainly way more than any of these features would need by orders of magnitude.

Most of the silicon on a chip is turned off at any given time. That dead silicon doesn't hurt as much as you think.

Here's an example of the kinds of speedups you can get from something really small: 3% fleet-wide (estimated) speedup from 0.006% marginal silicon area.

https://www.samxi.org/papers/kanev_asplos2017.pdf

> No, they build their own servers. They definitely aren't racking Dell or HP servers.

Yes, they buy from Quanta, Supermicro, Wistron etc, the ones who make servers for Dell, and HP.

> Let me repeat that: Intel literally makes custom processors specifically for AWS.

Some unlockable features, and perf profiles. Those weird SKUs popup on liquidation sale websites from time to time.

Quanta is an ODM. You said OEM.

Unless this is some kind of performance art, you really should stop commenting and switch to reading.

>Quanta is an ODM. You said OEM.

Same difference, compared to building their own from parts. I don't think parent's point lies in the OEM vs ODM semantics detail.

Everything about this comment is so wrong that I recommend you discard all of your beliefs about the datacenter economy and start from scratch again.

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