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Comment by the_arun | Hacker News Reader

Imagine AWS launching ec2 instances with M1 chips!

They recently announced the mac.metal instance type for EC2 instances[0]. They currently only have Intel instances but I can’t see why the newer M1 instances aren’t coming soon.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/announcin...

They are coming, but they will be crippled because of Apple licensing terms. The minimum rental period is 24 hours (every time you turn it on) so it's quite useless for e.g. occasional build.

They have graviton, which is already more efficient by a huge margin (against intel per dollar).

More efficient than Intel i-series or more efficient than M1?

more efficient per dollar against their intel counterparts.

AWS can set their own price (or subsidize it to keep people on their cloud), more efficient per $ is not really a good way to judge how good is the chip, though it is a good measure for how much money will stay in your pocket.

True, but I believe graviton is still not like M1. Do they support i386 / backward compatible?

M1 is not i386 compatible. macOS uses a translation layer through Rosetta 2 for x86 compatibility.

Sorta - There is translation layer in software but the reason the M1 is so fast at executing x86 code is that it has hardware support for switching to the x86 memory model. This is something no other ARM processor I'm aware of has.

Is this true? I didn't see this detail anywhere I looked. If you have a source that would be interesting.

It was previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233554 but I can't find the primary source linked anywhere.

> Do they support i386

No. But for many use cases that’s not a big deal, since you’re likely to be running Linux & other open source software that already has ARM versions or can be recompiled.

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