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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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