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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why?

Cavium ThunderX; Now under Marvell, has a newer ThunderX2 and an upcoming X3 [1]. Since they explicitly mentioned ARM64 it seems they are giving up the ARM64 Server business as a whole.

I was surprised when they launch C1 / ARM Offering so early in 2013, and would have expected the experiment to end in a few years time, but to discontinue ARM64 after AWS announced they are going All in, seems something. ( Sigh, my limited lexicon. Cant find the right word. )

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-thunderx3-arm-server-cp...

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I have a C2 with them, and find that whenever I try to reboot it from within the VPS, it kernel panics rather than reboots. This makes automated security updates requiring reboot problematic (this is a small personal server for running nextcloud, I don't care if it has a couple of minutes downtime in the early morning, but turning off and not turning back on again is more annoying.)

I don't know for sure if this was the issue that caused them to stop, but I expect if there was this and other issues that were hard to solve or kept cropping up, they perhaps just decided it was trouble than it was worth.

For that specific issue (the reboot one on C2), it seems to be cause by an interaction between xnbd-client and systemd:

https://github.com/scaleway/image-ubuntu/issues/87#issuecomm...

From the email they sent all consumer:

> As of December 1 st, 2020, our C2 and ARM64 Instances will reach their end-of-life. The physical servers hosting them are indeed randomly affected by several stability issues, which prevent us from fully guaranteeing the overall quality of service

ARM servers aren't much cheaper and you deal with extra stuff. I'm sure they have their use cases, but as a typical VPS user I don't see the point.

I’ve always seen the primary utility of ARM being in devices attached to a battery. In a data center the costs of changing probably trounce whatever power savings may be available.

As a former Scaleway employee, I can confirm the energy profile of the ARM racks were very nice.

It has been publicly said before by many, though I'm not sure we ever released any data publicly on this, so I'll keep this at the anecdata level

Note that power savings in a DC are double: the device itself uses less; but you also save power in the AC.

Using non-x86 (or even just non-Intel) is also an investment, as you are less dependent on a duopoly.

The former makes sense. It’s just a question of whether those power savings are enough to offset the cost of switching, both for the hosting provider and the consumer.

The latter is tricky. You’re creating redundancy, which is good. But that redundancy is mighty expensive, as you have to either accept a lower quality of service in both, or invest in more specialized labor for both platforms.

Analogy: One of the ways that Southwest managed to keep costs down was to use one type of plane. While its peers used a mixed group of Airbus and Boeing aircraft tailored to the route, Southwest only used the 737. This allowed it to save huge amounts of money on maintenance and pilot training, as tons of parts and crew were easily moved around. And then the 737 MAX8 clusterfuck happened, and Southwest is stuck spending more fuel than its Airbus A321-neo flying competitors are.

Not double, really. Phase change cooling is surprisingly efficient, you get a lot more heat moved than you'd expect for the power consumption (hundreds of percent).

AWS is all-in because they acquired Annapurna Labs and are designing their own in-house ARM chips. I'm sure they've found a way to do that cheaper than buying from Intel or AMD. Scaleway is nowhere near the size of Amazon, nor do they own their own in-house chip design studio. Not really an apples to apples comparison.

AMD Epyc came.

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