Intel seems awfully scared of Graviton2. Why pay for this ad on Google?
intel.com
intel.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but it's not ok to use the title box for that. Here are three better options:
(1) make a text post, describing what you observed (in this the Google ad), providing appropriate links, and giving your point of view;
(2) submit the URL with the original title and add a comment to the thread explaining why you posted it. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
(3) put up a blog post somewhere and submit that to HN instead (this is basically the same as (1) but on an external site).
"Linux might be free but look at our sponsored study which says that actually our hardware gives you more uptime and our devtools are better and our patch system does this and our FS is faster and we can cluster this amount of cores and ..."
But in the end the systems were still 5x or more what an x86 server would cost, and everyone was just having a go with linux at work and at home anyway, because they already had x86 hardware laying around.
(IIRC Microsoft tried a similar TCO gambit a few times as well)
I think the reason is that they thought of them as an operational tool. Its basically a cheap VM. However, led to crazy docker adoption was its use as a dev-tool and in development making it really easy to run simply stuff.
Only then people started thinking about using this seriously deploy application on mass scale with docker. And then they realized that containers on Linux were just patchwork and the security story was a mess.
Zones were developed to serve as VM replacements, so for them security and resource management was very important.
If only Intel had continued with Xscale in 2000s and become an external foundry. The world would look very different now I think.
They have similar kind of “Don’t Leave Intel!” marketing against Apple’s M1 chips that comes off equally petty and desperate:
Edit: I felt they'd found one organisational solution to this after the netburst bust, what with their R&D branch in Israel (?) working on an alternative (pentium m and what would become the 'Core' architecture) without too much disturbance and avoiding the pitfalls of working on competing products?
But there are only so much your engineers are allowed to do when competing with the company's current cash cow.
Too bad AMD is competitive right now, maybe they should bribe them after all.
Why do you think you have the famous "Intel inside" logo or sound or animation in ads? Because Intel pays you to display that...
Or at least it was not too long ago.
https://www-techspot-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.techspot...
It's not a monopoly though, as there's also AMD.
Itanium is an interesting historical example. I think Intel learnt the wrong lesson though: ‘cling to x86 at all costs’ when it was really that Itanium was just the wrong product. If they’d pushed a high quality Intel only 64 bit RISC design instead of Itanium at the time they might have succeeded.
Edit: Just to expand on this a bit. At the time of Itanium they had a clear process lead. They could have offered the best server CPUs on an Intel only RISC ISA and invested heavily in helping customers migrate. Arm got customers from aarch32 to aarch64 seamlessly.
Innovate.
For years and years, Intel's approach has seemed to be just add an extra 100Mhz base clock and call it a new model. You appear to be getting largely the same chip on the same process for more or less the same performance compared to a chip from 18-24 months ago.
Meanwhile AMD and Apple have come along with someone new and essentially are eat intel's lunch.
Is the margin that Intel has not as big as I had imagined? Is the idea of reduced margins so terrible that the money behind Intel (the stock market?) would rather let Intel die than accept a significantly lower rate of return?
I know I'm missing something here and I don't know what it is...
"Can't they just make less money?"
No. They can't. Not without looking like they're dying, which will cause or hasten said death.
This is my guess now: yes, Intel is a massively profitable company. But I think what the market is factoring in is that it missed the technology shift to smaller chips (5nm?) which its competitors (Apple, TSMC, etc) are able to do. Further, Apple & ARM are eating into the mobile space, and AMD and NVidia are biting away at Intel's data center share.
I think without a major tech break-through, Intel looks like it might miss this next semiconductor shift, and that's why the market is selling because it is starting to look like an also-ran at this point. Think IBM.
Why not both? Intel has been stuck at $20B net income for years.
AMZN went from $10B to $20B to likely $26B in the same years.
AAPL went from $55B to $95B.
MSFT went from $40B to $61B to $68B.
Alphabet from $30B to $40B to $70B.
FB from $22B to $30B to $40B.
Nvidia went from $4B to $8B and Qualcomm from $5B to $10B. AMD from $0.3B to $4B.
Does not look good when companies above and below you are greatly able to increase earnings and you are sitting still.
AMD might be but has NVIDIA even entered the CPU market yet?
I'd guess that they have teams making both ARM and RISC-V designs just to hedge their bets and offer something to those markets. People seem to forget that Intel used to have an entire ARM division with a license to do custom designs.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1132112/arm-market-share....
In the alternative, the CPU might reasonably represent 1/5 to 1/3 of total costs. How much higher could Intel price their chip while still being competitive from the TCO perspective? The answer is nearly 2x on a per unit basis using those numbers.
That calculation was relatively easy when all of the chips had very similar number of cores, and the advantage was squarely in single-core performance. It's slightly harder now, in a world where there is considerable divergence in things like number of cores and energy efficiency in addition to single core performance. But the implications of those equations have obviously swung strongly against Intel for large parts of the market. There are AMD/arm chips that are probably 2x or more the current multi-core performance of the Intel chips that were at similar prices last year. Intel has advantages around lock-in and brand, but the economic incentive of transition now can be quite staggering, and people are waking up to it.
Whether Intel will be able to make chips that would be competitive in that market, even with no margin, is yet to be seen.
That is the different between a "manager" and a leader / entrepreneur. Most CEOs are at best half decent managers.
It is funny, the person with the idea of reduced margins, invest to innovate and compete would never have risen to the top of the organisation. For all sort of political reasons and shareholder values. I think this is the number one reason why startup matures to enterprise and fade over a long period of time. Without the vision from founders that make these bold strategic decisions.
It feels weird to watch Intel competing again, but we can't really expect them to sit on their hands. In a weird way, they have become an underdog while still dominating their core markets.
Their ad (already a sort of plea/admission of weakness) basically relies on that inertia and structure. I guess it is good they aren't completely dismissive of AMD and Apple+ARM.
The barbarians are at the gate. IBM was once invincible too.
I also should note that ARM is particularly dangerous in EC2/aws. Setting up an ARM instance to try out is really easy compared to an x86 instance. All of a sudden, you realize an ARM platform on Linux is little additional effort from a package standpoint. Then some software maker realized setting up ARM test platforms is near-effortless in CI builds.
Uhoh, the instruction set doesn't matter anymore.
They are saying that performance on their chips is upto 1.8x faster in most common workloads. Also, doesn't need any expensive porting.
They do compare performance, but have emphasized on cost and compatibility.
If cloud computing has shown them anything, its that it is very difficult to be a monopoly player if your end users are insulated from your branding.
If this is the best defence of their performance vs AWS Arm they can come up with then they have a major problem.
- we switched our nodejs workload to graviton (c6g from c5), and it resulted in needing more instances, which ended up costing nearly exactly the same price
- ARM is annoying in practice for some stuff (we build our docker images on our CI which is on premise and not ARM)
- AWS pushed a bit to have us move to graviton
- Where are the c6a ? :)
They are running on nodejs 12 (soon 16 ^^). They are using quite a lot of CPU, probably mostly due to having to parse large amount of JSON, and a bunch of cryptographic operations (mostly hmacs, AES - we are only using nodejs built-in crypto primitive) - but I don't know for sure to be honest - hence the choice of C type instances.
Other packages and databases have brought me pain to use on arm. And anywhere I encounter pain I just don't migrate.
[0]: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0602/2021-09/SVE-...
AWS represent ~50% of hyperscaler. ~50% of EC2 are now on Graviton and limited by Fab capacity. It is a much bigger threat than AMD.
>1.65x higher MongoDB v4.4.1 Enterprise, Storage/Instance: EBS io1 2x 800GB, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5, 25Gbps for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0-1025-aws.
>1.76x higher MySQL 8.0.20, HammerDB v3.2, Storage/Instance: EBS io1 1x 800GB, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5, 25Gbps for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0-1029-aws.
>1.19x higher PostgreSQL 13.1, HammerDB v4.0, Storage: SSD, Network BW/Instance 20Gbps for M5 and AWS default for M6g, Ubuntu 20.04, Kernel 5.4.0.
Their claimed performance above, probably better for everyone to make their own judgement.
Any quote for this number? I googled it but can't find source, and it isn't my experience either.
Yep, it perhaps would have been better with a [Ask HN] title and the link in the post.
After meeting it took me effort beat sense into some people, i.e. to run some testing for our workloads instead of shifting stuff asap to graviton instances.
If those ads make people pause and run actual tests, it's a win for them
Intel is under attack from multiple angles.
graviton is not clear cut
If I'm writing new software using Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, etc. it's easy to deploy to ARM. With Apple moving to ARM and 25% of developers using Macs (41-45% using Windows)*, there's going to be good ARM support for what developers need. Sure, some things might might run better on Intel and some things might not easily port, but that feels like it isn't the case for the majority of stuff that developers are going to be doing.
It seems likely that Microsoft and Google will introduce ARM-based instances. We know Google has dipped its toe in with its Tensor processor for the Pixel. We've seen reports that Microsoft has been working on ARM processors for servers. Qualcomm is gearing up for a major push into better ARM processors to compete with Apple on the desktop/laptop, but presumably they'd be happy to get cloud workloads as well. Oracle, while not a major cloud provider, has ARM-based instances already.
Intel has had a virtual monopoly for 20 years. Now they're facing a resurgent AMD stealing x86 marketshare and ARM processors that are quickly becoming a better price/performance option - and Apple is ensuring that everything developers need will be ARM compatible. I don't think it's an existential threat, but there's a huge difference between the margins you get as a virtual monopoly and the margins you get when you have to compete against strong competitors.
Plus, I'd guess that AWS is probably making sweet margins off those Graviton instances. Let's say that their margin on Intel instances is X and that margin on Graviton is 2X. That leaves AWS a lot of room to start pushing Intel out of their datacenters as old hardware is replaced. Let's say you're a company spending $100M/year with AWS and you're renewing your contract. Maybe Amazon suggests that they could give you a 20% discount off Intel boxes and a 40% discount off Graviton boxes - which they say are already 20% better price/performance so it's basically 52% off!
It also gives AWS negotiating power with Intel. If 20% of AWS customers move to Graviton, you can go to Intel and say, "we're finding Graviton processors really cheap to make and operate and customers are loving them...more and more they're realizing they don't need your Intel processors...if we don't get cheaper Intel processors, we might have to accelerate our incentives to get people onto Graviton boxes...the more we accelerate that, the more Google Cloud and Azure will likely want to prioritize ARM boxes..."
They're scared because it's the type of thing that snowballs until their lock-in is near meaningless. If ARM becomes 50% of the server market, there goes Intel's ability to demand high margins. 5-10 years from now, most deployments could use Intel or ARM based on price/performance rather than instruction set - and that makes life a lot harder for Intel.
The problem with this ad/page is that the ship has already sailed. Once Apple introduced its M1 MacBooks, we were getting first-class ARM support for everything developers would need going forward. It didn't happen overnight, but with Apple going all-in on ARM chips and with Macs being such a big player in developer usage, the war was lost that day. Now it's just a matter of time. Once all your devs are running and testing their stuff on an M1 MacBook, why not deploy it to an ARM instance?
* From StackOverflow's 2021 developer survey
I’d guess like everything they do, they’re taking a bath on margin in the short term to solidify a monopoly in the long term. Amazon made basically $0 for over a decade. Investors were fine with that because everyone knew they were building a monopoly to later be exploited.
Actually google was the first. Its called TPU - Tensor Processing Units and has been available for their ML platform for a long time. Interestingly, TPU replaces nvidia in this case.
There are already largescale Kaggle benchmarks on CPU vs GPU vs TPU - https://towardsdatascience.com/when-to-use-cpus-vs-gpus-vs-t...
I'm mentioning that Google Cloud primarily hosts and bills your ML code on TPUs. Today TPU v4 run at exascale.
so the equivalence "scared" behavior exists for both Intel and nvidia on Google already.
Instead $/ML training job or time to complete training given X budget is likely a better measure.
Our entire deployment stack is Java/Python on Linux.
I'm looking at our deployments and thinking, we sure would save a lot of money, and likely deliver a superior product if we switched to ARM on both AWS and OCI. Better product due to beefing up the Postgres clusters with part of the savings.
My hope is that by the end of Q2, our default deployment is on ARM on OCI. We're looking at nearly a 50% cost reduction versus the current m5 RDS and other EC2 instances.
If switching to ARM means general parity on per core performance, I can easily sell rolling a portion of that savings into a bigger baseline config for all customers. Especially on Oracle, where their charges for RAM on A1 are peanuts.
I thought the industry's consensus was a key component of Intel's dominance is they leveraged the best fab tech in the world, made possible by huge volume. That's a virtuous cycle on the way up and terrible as volume decreases...
Apple has moved to arm but does this really make it easier to write cloud apps for arm linux? What is Apple doing to make this easier?
So the conversation went from “what’s the cost of getting our systems running on ARM and how does that compare to cloud pricing” to “our systems work everywhere, so who’s giving us the best deal”
They’re making ARM machines with really great perfs and used by a pretty large amounts of developers leading to:
* way more developers getting comfortable and natural access to ARM devices, meaning way easier for them to test & debug ARM issues
* way larger market for ARM developer tools
The biggest thing not being talked about that hurts Intel is AWS’ pool of Intel CPUs that currently run S3, SQS, Dynamo, etc (m3s, c4s, etc) all being released to the public and offered at such a discount (especially on the spot market) that new onprem purchases (i.e. new Intel chips) are not cost effective.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Amazon but never in AWS. This is all based on public speculation.
1) if their managed services (RDS, DynamoDB, etc) can run on ARM and it provides a better price/performance ratio, they'll use that internally, thus needing less x86 hardware
2) if most customers can run on ARM (interpreted languages run out of the box, compiled ones need more effort but is still doable) and it's better priced than x86 there is less demand on x86 again.
I think Go needs a flag specified at compile time to work on ARM. Instead of `go build`, run `env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build`.
Rust is similar, except it requires the appropriate toolchain to be installed first (1-liner).
It’s probably less effort what I’ve described because there are GitHub Actions that will generate appropriate binaries out of the box.
(This holds true for JS/python/… too.)
Just tell Go to use the appropriate cross compilation chain for the C bits, e.g. `apt install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu` and set the `CC=aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc` environment variable to compile for arm64. Compilation becomes a bit slower, but it's still manageable.
It's that easy thanks to the foundations laid by the distribution that ships a solid cross-compiler setup (in this example, thank you Debian!) and of course the brilliance of the Go design and toolchain.
I do think x86 will be phased out as you suggest. I feel either Intels foundry division and/or chip designs for ARM and/or RISC-V will very likely get incorporated into Graviton-X (and similar) if only as a bargaining tactic between Intel vs TSMC and Intel vs Qualcomm vs ARM.
> How easy is to replace the operating system on an ARM mobile device
Very easy if you have an Android phone :)
But the restriction is that many OEMs and/or carriers forbids bootloader unlock.
1. Have bootloader unlock available via official channels. If you are in the 1% with a supported phone variant, congratulations. Service box unlocks, while often possible unofficially, rarely result in a critical mass of developers that's needed for the next step.
2. Have a ROM ready to go. If lucky, it'll be Lineage OS. If less lucky, some unofficial build of Lineage OS with potentially some hardware not supported (but there's hope!). If you are really unlucky, the phone is so unpopular that a ROM developer hasn't taken enough interest in it to produce a usable ROM.
3. Flash the ROM, keeping all idiosyncrasies of the particular hardware in mind. Hope you got the right partition table/kernel/bootloader/ fragile fragment, because if you flash the one meant for GEX5546ab on a hardware that corresponds to GEX5546cb, you just killed your phone. Run through contingency procedures for unbricking the phone in case you need them.
4. Congratulations. You now have a firmware that works better than the factory OS, but they also happens to potentially not support small things like Bluetooth or the camera blobs. You may get support in 2-3 months, hopefully. Your secure enclave keys are also gone, so bank apps will be suspicious and Netflix will refuse to serve higher-quality content.
Untrue for most of the phones on XDA, S3 was the most popular android phone and came locked.
>2. Have a ROM ready to go. If lucky, it'll be Lineage OS. If less lucky, some unofficial build of Lineage OS with potentially some hardware not supported (but there's hope!). If you are really unlucky, the phone is so unpopular that a ROM developer hasn't taken enough interest in it to produce a usable ROM.
Luck to me is more than LOS, its the bare minimum, but I have gotten unlucky with non popular phones. Not hard to look at roms when you see if you should root or install custom bootloader.
>3. Flash the ROM, keeping all idiosyncrasies of the particular hardware in mind. Hope you got the right partition table/kernel/bootloader/ fragile fragment, because if you flash the one meant for GEX5546ab on a hardware that corresponds to GEX5546cb, you just killed your phone. Run through contingency procedures for unbricking the phone in case you need them.
You could just run Halium to run Linux with all drivers, or use chroot to have linux in it too. Safety that existed since 2012 prevented me from ever having a single issue like that, and I never bricked a phone with over 20 flashes.
>4. Congratulations. You now have a firmware that works better than the factory OS, but they also happens to potentially not support small things like Bluetooth or the camera blobs. You may get support in 2-3 months, hopefully. Your secure enclave keys are also gone, so bank apps will be suspicious and Netflix will refuse to serve higher-quality content.
This was occasionally true before 2017. All new phones have mainline linux support. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3306443/what-is-projec... https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu...
Basically, if you spend 10 minutes looking up relevant information, buy a popular phone with good support and you will face 0 problems. You are making a mountain out of a molehill.
The danger is that the transition to another architecture is used as an excuse to not do this, even for devices that have historically been open.
That's why I consider alternative ecosystems (that don't have exorbitant prices) like RISC-V and Raspberry Pi to be critical to the survival of general-purpose computing. Once your ability to run on bare metal disappears (via Secure Boot or otherwise), you're in grave danger of simply not having physical hardware to convert new users.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/299...
> coup-de-gras
Is funny. Gras (pronounced gra) means fat(as in animal fat, not a fat panda), and the real saying is coup de grâce (pronounced gras and means grace). For some weird reason English speakers pronounce coup de grâce improperly, skipping the s sound at the end ( funnily it's usually the French language which cuts sounds), including in movies (like Kill Bill).
Wasn't the Apple I the modern general purpose computer?
Virtually all of which are user-unlockable. But keep telling me how unopen they are?
(BTW, those of us who actually want secure systems very much appreciate the fact that malware can't overwrite my boot sector without a hardware-level vulnerability.)
>Can you install Windows or Linux on ARM Macs?
ARM Windows sucks. I wouldn't even try, asahi can be installed (but I don't get why you would, all unix stuff works) https://asahilinux.org/about/
The applications themselves are in TypeScript, and Node as a runtime is cross arch without any extras. The hardest part is building docker images from my Github action.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that AWS is secretly switching the hardware running of their serverless overrings to use their in-house chips. Things like lambda (assuming source is distributed), aurora serverless, Dynamo, Cognito, CloudFront, etc
Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and various arm based embedded systems played a much higher role in getting most linux, BSD tools working under arm.
Same thing that’s happening now with RISC-V and SiFive’s boards.
It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.
The cake was all those consumer arm boards and dev kits which got in the hands of various OS developers, software maintainers. Who put in their time to port their codebases to arm and ensure compatibility.
M1 probably enables the same transition for customer-oriented, proprietary apps. But it has little to do with cloud computing, except proving that performance and ARM are not mutually exclusive, thus providing more acceptance.
If there are CLI ways to do this stuff I'd love to hear them.
I know sshd is controlled through systemsetup[1].
sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on
Well, to be honest it was probably macos+M1 platform support. Docker runs a virtual machine with Linux in it on macos and windows, not sure improvements there directly translate to server workloads. I am not sure about node, but it was surely working very well on ARM before that, although it might gain some optimizations thanks to M1.
None of the paid software with a tiny userbase you're thinking of is relevant to the server market, the point is that it's free and open.
Pi entered a mature ecosystem, it just made it a bit more consumer/newbie facing but the system level foundations were all there.
Ironically the Pi isn’t even particularly well supported in terms of drivers compared to commercial offerings.
While strongarm and others have been around longer, none had any real mass market hold. With Pi & co, you can build a (slow) server with $35. You can build a k8 cluster with $150. That's why we have cross platform packages for almost anything server related.
Fast forward to today, you can apt-get cross-compilers and build tools.
It was pioneering in how low-cost and mass market it was at launch, but before the Pi there was plug computing, largely based around Marvell Kirkwood processors. There were also a variety of hackable NAS devices, I used some with Orion5x CPUS in. Then before plug computing there was the linksys NSLU2 with its Intel Xscale IXP chip, and all the hackable linksys routers going back to 2002, and that's just some of the stuff I've played with over the years. Before that I imagine there were previous generations of linux ARM support.
The Pi and other hobby boards are really great, don't get me wrong, but there's a tendency to credit them with a bit too much.
Whoa, haven't heard that one in a looong time. Still have mine sitting in a storage closet, I think...
I used to run my own mail server on one and use another as a media server. I even did a small hardware mod and soldered a wifi card to one of the internal USB headers on one of them. Much fun!
I don't imagine the processing power stands up to modern devices though :)
Yes, it reached a wide audience, they did a lot of great stuff getting capable dev boards out to a lot of people. But fully functional Linux on ARM pre-dates the Pi significantly.
(I’d argue the NSLU2 and sheevaplug were both pretty affordable, at sub-$100 too, but the Pi definitely upped the game there)
If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?
Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.
Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.
But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.
It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.
Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!
But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.
For their time (20 years ago), they certainly were cheap. $100 or so for a small power efficient box that could run almost a whole Linux distribution was an amazing bargain. Before that, you needed a good-sized desktop or server to do anything involving a Unix-like OS, or paid dearly for the convenience of a laptop.
And it wasn't much before that, that running Unix on any microcomputer was just a dream.
It's hard to comprend just how amazingly affordable computing has become in such a short amount of time.
I remember that time in my life very well. I literally had around $50 in my local currency in the coin box, and that was it. Hand me down computers were unavailable where I was.
Apples are upset their $2000+ laptop isn't the revolutionary catalyst for the Arm revolution but instead a crappy $25 computer that's been around for a decade.
I don't disagree, but going mainstream is different.
>It’s not apple M1 that’s making this migration possible, its just the cherry on top of a cake.
M1 would not exist without the Apple's App store all based on ARM.
For example, consider that golang has been able to cross-compile to ARM since almost the very start. That alone has probably contributed more to actual ARM server deployment than M1 (which is by the way not available for cloud or any server systems).
Apple most definitely does _not_ support that thing. In fact, they have in past tried to shut down similar initiatives.
Of course Pi has started a big movement and prepared the groundwork, but M1, which I also use, is something else in terms of performance, and it caused this build-up to become an avalanche. Cloud systems will inevitably ride this wave, and will seriously eat into Intel's market share.
Just provisioned a small docker-lab in an ORACLE Cloud Ampere system. This thing is seriously snappy at the first glance.
So the only thing that is new is that ARM architecture is finally starting to "spill over" into the notebook/desktop and server market and preparing to eat Intel's (and AMD's) cake. But the wide-scale adoption of the architecture already has a long history, so presenting Raspi and Apple M1 as "pioneers of ARM introduction" is a bit misleading (Apple was a pioneer, but already back in 2007).
Before that there were already ARM servers too, but they're few and far between.
So I was trying to say that, Raspberry Pi and Apple M1 made ARM "touchable" with standard development tools and utilities for the normal people out there. So, this interaction accelerated the acceptance and software porting and grown the ecosystem faster.
Everyone already had an iPhone or Android, how was it not touch distance for the layman?
OTOH, you can get a pi, add peripherals (or just network), and you have a system to be hacked and tinkered on.
This is what I meant by touch distance.
Jailbreaking was so easy someone like Justin Beiber did it. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/07/29/justin-bieber-jailb...
Saurik and the original jailbreakers did all the heavy lifting, APT, SSH, and the usual CLI tools were ported so they could enjoy their handheld Unix computers.
Pi was an image on a microSD, some computer interfaces, it was very slow, burned out the microSD card, and was discouraging for me to use when I had a much better computer, the phones were easy to invest effort in, if I had a way crappy computer I wouldn't do too much with it, most people throw PiHole and never touch it again.
Been there, done that. Doesn't matter. Tinkering with a critical life infrastructure device vs, tinkering with a device made for tinkering is different. Way different.
> Jailbreaking was so easy someone like Justin Beiber did it
Again, doesn't matter because of the reasons I've said earlier. I'm using both platforms for a decade, and won't do them to my primary devices either. Because these devices are handling a lot of stuff for me, tinkering with them is not an option.
> Pi was an image on a microSD, some computer interfaces, it was very slow, burned out the microSD card, and was discouraging for me to use when I had a much better computer, the phones were easy to invest effort in, if I had a way crappy computer I wouldn't do too much with it, most people throw PiHole and never touch it again.
Actually, with a semi-decent SD card, burning one out with a Raspberry Pi is almost impossible. If you're worried about that, you can add a ZRAM, move swap and some folders to it (as Raspbian does), and sync during reboots, or periodically. If you're downloading world on it, a USB drive can alleviate the worry too.
On the slowness side, a first generation Raspberry Pi has a comparable performance to a Pentium II - 266MHz system, with similar performance to GPUs of that era. Considering the things I've done (live webcasting for example) with a P2 at that time, A Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse for its size.
You may have a much better computer with way higher specs, but you're missing the point. A Pi is a literally unbrickable and forgettable Linux PC with decent performance and no noise for many tasks many people do. I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
I can replace all of it with a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2, but the OrangePi is much smaller.
Just because it can't race with a specially built workstation, doesn't mean it's useless.
If you use them for a lot of things, wouldn't you want to tinker them to make them run better? I certainly do on linux.
>You may have a much better computer with way higher specs, but you're missing the point. A Pi is a literally unbrickable and forgettable Linux PC with decent performance and no noise for many tasks many people do. I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
I don't fear my PC being brickable, and its not noisy either, you can use water cooling for desktop or use a modern laptop, many are fanless (can't say the same about the Pi4). I have for example a router I used custom firmware on that can do everything a pihole can do, and more, just works quietly, it can do also act as a smart hub but I don't see the point.
>I can replace all of it with a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2, but the OrangePi is much smaller.
I find the problem with SBCs is they are too slow to be worthwhile, Android phones are much faster, have all inputs, and just works. Its not hard to buy an extra or use an old one if you fear tinkering.
>Been there, done that. Doesn't matter. Tinkering with a critical life infrastructure device vs, tinkering with a device made for tinkering is different. Way different.
What is "made for tinkering"? A Unix phone that can run all the software I want, a linux phone with root access, or my PSP which was made to play PSP and PS1 games with excellent homebrew counts as not made for tinkering seems alien. What can't they do? Throw a breakout board if you need the pins, I don't get the issue with using them. A one click root or unlock is way less complex than buying required parts to make an SBC work.
>On the slowness side, a first generation Raspberry Pi has a comparable performance to a Pentium II - 266MHz system, with similar performance to GPUs of that era. Considering the things I've done (live webcasting for example) with a P2 at that time, A Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse for its size.
>Just because it can't race with a specially built workstation, doesn't mean it's useless.
No its just not very useful for me, its hard to want to eat ground pork when there is steak to be had, I don't see the point of it really when my computer does everything better, why would someone want to use it to webcast for instance or use the PII era GPU? Sure you can emulate games one it, but I can on my computer already.
>I'm running an home infrastructure on an OrangePi Zero and the bottleneck is the 512MB RAM, not the CPU. With a decent SD card, it's not slow either.
You aren't disagreeing with me, you use it for a purpose (like a PiHole), not as a computer. I can use slower boards for purposes like yours too, what do you use it for? I don't really understand the benefit of a smart home hub, what are you running on it for what automation/smart?
Even before Pi my router had DDWRT, I don't think Pi did very much.
To be honest, i hardly know anyone ( little bit biased because of .net development)
I was using a Mac when I worked for a Fortune 500 enterprise. The choice was between a top of the line Macbook Pro with sudo rights and some underpowered Thinkpad where I'd have to request software to be installed by someone.
Not exactly what i suspected, but in retrospect my comment wasn't clear. I should have mentioned that eg. IOs engineers / Mac developers have no option. Which would be some share of the market.
But your comment was more valuable, thanks!
> Plus, I'd guess that AWS is probably making sweet margins off those Graviton instances.
> It also gives AWS negotiating power with Intel.
It's not just about pricing. Another convincing argument for the move towards ARM [1] is that the big cloud providers like AWS have much more insight into cloud workloads than Intel could ever have, with vast amounts of metrics, so custom-designing chips would be a somewhat natural path by itself.
[1] I heard this first in a presentation by Brendan Gregg, but I can't find the slides at the moment.
Let's rather say that Apple helps developers realize that the vast majority of open source dev tools they need have been working seamlessly on arm platforms for decades thanks to the work of linux and bsd distros.
The killer is there was no friction at all and target is cheaper. It all just worked. Absolutely no issues at all.
The thing that scares intel is that they’re not special any more.
‘Wow. Intel is conceding that Graviton is faster for some workloads and seems to be really concerned about it. We should do a detailed cost benefit analysis.’
Completely counterproductive in my view.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16780/intel-to-create-riscv-d...
You may have heard that it’s no big deal to port your code from one architecture to another. However, porting takes time and money. It’s a complicated, intense process. Plus, ARM doesn’t run every software program out there, so when you’re ready to add new functionality from Intel, you’ll be stuck with the limitation of ARM and the long-term cost and hassle of managing multiple code bases.
Then turning around and fabbing riscv cores is pretty sickening. If I was at SiFive I would be unenthusiastic about having Intel as a partner.
Databases and ML likely are winners for intel due to this optimization, while stuff like nginx performs just fine on the ARM chips.
Do you have data to back this up? Especially the Databases part. There is another post in this same thread that has numbers, but claims the opposite.
By vertically integrating, Amazon gets to pocket that high margin revenue, as well as decide their own destiny.
This reads more like a DARE slogan than a publication from a major technology company.
Just say NO to single-vendor computing.
Just say NO to single-ISA computing.
Trivializing “try them all out effortlessly and settle on the most economical outcome” seems like the best response any competitor could pose.
"And that's why you should go all in on Intel-flavored x86 and avoid writing portable software!"
Honestly. Just... Can they hear themselves?
That said, I believe graviton 3 has fixed many of these deficiencies.
Some benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16979/the-ampere-altra-max-re..., https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review
Their chips are competitive with Graviton, as well as Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc.
It would be fun to play this out where Amazon starts a bank, a car company, a rocket ship company, etc. just to see how large it could possibly get.
https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed
UNH, Anthem, CVS, Humana, Cigna, Centene all earn low single digit profit margins, are extremely heavily regulated, and deal with healthcare providers that frequently have monopolies in their region.
I doubt it is worth trying to get into that business to try and capture the extra 3% profit margin they are currently paying to a managed care organization (aka health insurer).
ACA admin caps provided some pressure on that (the first in decades), but the amount of money burnt on bad or incompetent ideas is still staggering.
The HBR article's note about patient monopoly within a geographic area being key to provider price negotiation is a good observation.
Provider consolidation was driven by other factors (stability, survival), but it's definitely shifted the balance in insurer v provider negoations.
Tech can usually come in and clean house in a new business due to introducing highly scalable processes that drive down marginal costs to near zero. I do not see how that dynamic would be possible in the current healthcare business in the US involving patients, doctors, hospitals, government, and lots of bureaucracy due to the politics of how healthcare resources are allocated and who is liable.
I'd chalk the failure of tech to penetrate up to the lack of standard interfaces. The entire insurance-provider industry, after you pry the lid off and look closer, is essentially bespoke person-person for almost any transaction.
It's gotten better, but it's still a far cry away, compared to the industries tech is used to disrupting. And you can't Uber-ize everything because (a) labor supply is a high-skill position with credentialing and negotiating power & (b) regulation prohibits overly disruptive moves (thank god).
It's like Mark Penn's Scroogled campaign all over again.