As Anand has said, "There are no bad products, only bad prices" and with Rome able to provide twice the cores in ~twice the TDP all while being at a similar or higher frequency and probably higher IPC .. well, the price will have to be right.
Of course Amazon won't sell these chips. They pay the Fab their margin but the rest goes into their own pocket. So AWS can afford to sell cycles on these boxes for cheap and make more money on them than they would on AMD or Intel based servers. And they offer lots of services where they can shift the costs around and not worry about general performance on arbitrary workloads.. If these could handle most of the load of S3 service or RDS or similar, even that is a potentially huge savings.
Note that these instances for ec2 are available now for evaluation.
"Will these CPUs challenge AMD’s Rome or Intel’s Cascade Lake"
You should probably say performance at the end. As perf/price they might. If AWS is responsible for half the CPUs in use in the datacenter, than this CPU could have more volume than either Intel or AMD's server chips. AWS is getting so big, along with Azure and Google and FB, these data center companies might end up being bigger than the famous brands.
Kind of like how Costco is one of the biggest pizza retailers as a side effect of their store size.
The trouble is that the high-end tends to also be high-margin. Intel (and now, AMD?) can afford to make essentially no profit - or a loss - on the low-end in order to lock out the competition at that level.
Technically, its referring to quantum states and not strictly a quantized amount. Moving from one discrete state to another in a very rapid fashion would qualify as being similar to a "Quantum Leap", which does capture what people usually mean. Its the rate of change the more accurately conveys the sense vs the distance of the change.
The Amazon talking smiley-face on their boxes really creeps me out, but hopefully AWS and the Neoverse N1 will help keep the big boys (and girl) honest ...
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extide - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
As Anand has said, "There are no bad products, only bad prices" and with Rome able to provide twice the cores in ~twice the TDP all while being at a similar or higher frequency and probably higher IPC .. well, the price will have to be right.Drivebyguy - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - link
Of course Amazon won't sell these chips. They pay the Fab their margin but the rest goes into their own pocket. So AWS can afford to sell cycles on these boxes for cheap and make more money on them than they would on AMD or Intel based servers. And they offer lots of services where they can shift the costs around and not worry about general performance on arbitrary workloads.. If these could handle most of the load of S3 service or RDS or similar, even that is a potentially huge savings.Note that these instances for ec2 are available now for evaluation.
webdoctors - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
"Will these CPUs challenge AMD’s Rome or Intel’s Cascade Lake"You should probably say performance at the end. As perf/price they might. If AWS is responsible for half the CPUs in use in the datacenter, than this CPU could have more volume than either Intel or AMD's server chips. AWS is getting so big, along with Azure and Google and FB, these data center companies might end up being bigger than the famous brands.
Kind of like how Costco is one of the biggest pizza retailers as a side effect of their store size.
GreenReaper - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
The trouble is that the high-end tends to also be high-margin. Intel (and now, AMD?) can afford to make essentially no profit - or a loss - on the low-end in order to lock out the competition at that level.Death666Angel - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
There is such a thing as predatory pricing.mildewman - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
Its sad that people are still misusing the term "quantum",35 years after the QL.mildewman - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
From a definition - "In fact, a quantum leap is amazingly small. The word quantum refers to the smallest amount of something that you can have."jwittich - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Technically, its referring to quantum states and not strictly a quantized amount. Moving from one discrete state to another in a very rapid fashion would qualify as being similar to a "Quantum Leap", which does capture what people usually mean. Its the rate of change the more accurately conveys the sense vs the distance of the change.ksec - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
I will be surprised if they even have 70% of Skylake performance. A High Clock speed A76 simply wont do it.Much more looking forward to Zen 3 EPYC.
Wilco1 - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Neoverse N1 is about 45% faster per vCPU according to this: https://zdnet1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2019/11/30/3d9...So assuming Hyperthreading gives 30%, per-core performance is 95% of Skylake-SP.
Smell This - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
The Amazon talking smiley-face on their boxes really creeps me out, but hopefully AWS and the Neoverse N1 will help keep the big boys (and girl) honest ...
CognexTech - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Thanks for this design explanation. visit https://www.cognextech.com/aws-training-and-certif... for more details.