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Comment by talawahtech | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering how they were going to manage the fact that AMDs Zen3 based instances would likely be faster than Graviton2. Color me impressed. AWS' pace of innovation is blistering.

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I don't know. I prefer it when companies actually give the technical details.

> While we are still optimizing these instances, it is clear that the Graviton3 is going to deliver amazing performance. In comparison to the Graviton2, the Graviton3 will deliver up to 25% more compute performance and up to twice as much floating point & cryptographic performance. On the machine learning side, Graviton3 includes support for bfloat16 data and will be able to deliver up to 3x better performance.

This means nothing to me. Why is there more floating point and cryptographic performance? Did Amazon change the Neoverse core? Is this N1 cores still? Did they tweak the L1 caches?

I don't think Amazon has the ability to change the core design unfortunately. This suggests to me that maybe Amazon is using N2 cores now?

But it'd be better if Amazon actually said what the core design changes are. Even just saying "updated to Neoverse N2" would go a long way to our collective understanding.

AWS re:Invent is this week. This was announced as part of the CEO's keynote. I am sure we will get more details throughout the week in some of the more technical sessions.

>Why is there more floating point and cryptographic performance?

You can infer this to N2 which ARM gave their own results [1], N2 uses SVE2 256bit.

[1] https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...

N2 does not use 256b SVE2, though its cousin Neoverse V1 does. I think there's a very real chance that Grav3 is actually V1, not N2. (N2 uses 128b SVE vectors, as does the Cortex-A710 it's based on.)

Oh YES [1] . I got the two mixed up. I should have doubled checked. So it is V1.

The V1 design is available in both 7nm and 5nm.

Oh well I guess if AWS had it in 5nm they would have at least marketed it as such. So may be it is the same 7nm.

[1] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16640/Neoverse_Intro_3.png

Aren't the Zen3 instances still faster than Graviton 3? DDR5 is interesting, and while lower power is nice, the customers don't benefit from that much, mostly AWS itself with its power bill. I haven't seen pricing yet, but assume AWS will price their own stuff lower to win customers and create further lock-in opportunities (and even take a loss like with Alexa).

How does Graviton create lock-in? It's ARM.

I think the idea is by attracting new customers to EC2 via performance/price, and then enticing them to integrate with other harder-to-leave AWS services

That might make sense for Lambdas, but I don't see how that's the case with EC2, or how that's specific to Graviton vs x86 etc.

What's the motivation behind this question? Or why do you think Amazon wants to create lockin for Graviton processors.

Note that graviton represent a classic "disruptive technology" that is outside of the main stream market's "value network". I.e., it provides something that is valuable to marginal customers who are far from the primary revenue source of the larger market.

The post I was responding to said:

> but assume AWS will price their own stuff lower to win customers and create further lock-in opportunities (

Implying that by pricing Graviton lower users will be 'locked in' to AWS.

Yes, that's the problem. Graviton and M1 are competitive with x86. What about the rest of the ecosystem? Not so much. All the promising server projects have been canceled so far. You'll have to wait for Microsoft or Google to develop their own competitive ARM server CPU or migrate back to x86.

>Aren't the Zen3 instances still faster

I would guess price/performance matters more than peak performance for a lot of use cases. With prior Graviton releases, AWS has made it so they are better price/performance. Keep in mind that a vCPU on Graviton is a full core rather than SMT/Hyperthread (half a core).

Where is this narrative that Zen 3 instances are faster than Graviton 3 instances coming from?

I am pretty sure Zen 3 doesn't bring 25% ST performance improvement compared to Zen 2.

amd cailms 19% improvements, in some cases is more than that: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

Unfortunately those claims don't translate to servers, because the IO die's power usage increased and perf/w isn't much better [1]. Do the math and you get around 14% gain in SPEC MT workloads.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16778/amd-epyc-milan-review-p...

> Where is this narrative that Zen 3 instances are faster than Graviton 3 instances coming from?

Various benchmarks have shown EPYC Milan performing well compared to contemporary Xeon and ARM-based processors, but the most direct comparison that I've seen was when Phoronix compared Graviton2 M6g instances to GCP's EPYC Milan-powered T2D instances.[1] The T2D instances beat the equivalent M6g instances across the board, oftentimes by substantial margins.

Of course, that's comparing against Graviton2, not Graviton3, but the performance delta is wide enough that T2D instances will still probably be faster in most cases.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=tau-vm-t...

> Aren't the Zen3 instances still faster than Graviton 3?

Irrelevant.

The vast majority of applications running in the cloud are business applications that struggle to saturate the CPU and waste most of the CPU cycles idlying by in epoll/select loops. Unless you need HPC, you do not need the fastest CPU, either.

> create further lock-in opportunities

Don't like AWS/Graviton? Take your workload to the Oracle cloud and run it on Oracle ARM.

Don't like ARM? If your app is interpreted/JIT'd (e.g. Python/NodeJs) or byte code compiled (JVM), lift and shift it to the IBM cloud and run it on a POWER cloud instance – as long as IBM offers a price-performance ratio comparable to that of AWS/Graviton or you are willing to pay for it.

On that note being able to rent a 160 core machine for $1.6/hour on Oracles cloud service is really impressive. If you have an integer intensive workload (i tested SAT solving) the Ampere A1 machine Oracle rents out are really competitive.

I don't do HPC, just real time video encoding. It's never enough even with h264.

On a per thread basis - yes. On a per dollar basis on AWS - no. Per instance basis - depends a lot.

Nice wording with 'per core performance'. We had difficulties properly conveying this point in our product when comparing our CI runners[1] to GitHub Actions CI Runner. I will be using it in our next website update. Tack

[1]https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions

Honestly, they’re not innovating so much as forcing a product market fit that everyone knew existed, but didn’t have the business case to develop without a hyperscalar anchor customer (like AWS!)

If anything, this is just another data point that shows how truly commoditized tech is. I just worry what happens when Amazon decides to “differentiate” after they lock you in.

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