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Comment by Rafuino | Hacker News Reader

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).

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>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).

> 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.

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.

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...

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