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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing! We're witnessing the beginning of the demise of Intel in the data canter, right in front of our eyes. I had thought this would take decades...

I just hope that thanks to large companies like CloudFlare buying large numbers of ARM servers their prices finally start going down to a reasonable level.

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I don't think so. I'm guessing that the xeons feature set is not used at all and this specific payload is just much better on that arm.

There is a big chance, that whatever cloudflare is doing on that machine, is massive parallel and simple.

My understanding is that some large parts of the feature set aren't usable anyhow. E.g. there's enough of a ramp up/ramp down power cost for the vector units that you'd never want to compile your binaries with SSE/AVX turned on unless your workload makes near constant use of those units.

I have never heard that one before. Do you have any sources for that?

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-AVX-instructions-so-power-hung...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925039

Thanks for the quotes. Apparently I slightly misremembered the problem. From the second one, this is what I was thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13926839

These nine specific payloads, if you take the tweet's words literally.

Those are indeed workloads, specific for a webserver and even more specific for CF. Many other workloads that we don't care about that Intel can handily win of course. We don't have use for most Intel extensions, like AVX512 and barely use any AVX2. Intel is the king of HPC and single threaded performance for a few more years. Although ARM can potentially leapfrog Intel in the HPC space, if someone implements the Salable Vector Instruction extension in 1024 or 2048 bit.

"I had thought this would take decades.."

It is taking decades at this rate. Or at least a decade.

Not to long ago when Intel was yanking the rug out from under the SPARC and POWER and MIPS and $RANDOM_PROPRIETARY_MAINFRAME_CISC datacenter marketshares.

> I had thought this would take decades...

Well it took decades...

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