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Comment by Dunedan | Hacker News Reader

> The final result is a chip that lets AWS sell each Graviton 3 core at a lower price, while still delivering a significant performance boost over their previous Graviton 2 chip.

That's not correct. AWS sells Graviton 3 based EC2 instances at a higher price than Graviton 2 based instances!

For example a c6g.large instance (powered by Graviton 2) costs $0.068/hour in us-east-1, while a c7g.large instance (powered by Graviton 3) costs $0.0725/hour [1]. Both instances have the same core count and memory, although c7g instances have slightly better network throughput.

I believe that is pretty unusual as, if my memory serves me right, newer instances family generations are usually cheaper than the previous generation.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

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Based on the first published benchmarks, even the programs which have not been optimized for Neoverse V1, and which do not benefit from its much faster floating-point and large-integer computation abilities, still show a performance increase of at least 40%, so greater than the price increase.

So I believe that using Graviton 3 at these prices is still a much better deal than using Graviton 2.

Definitely unusual, as the graph here shows: https://github.com/patmyron/cloud/

Could it be due to increasing global energy prices?

I don't follow. You seem to be implying that Amazon would like to reduce their electricity usage. If so, shouldn't they be charging less for the more efficient instance type?

No, they charge for compute, which the new CPU provides more of, even though it consumes the same amount of electricity as a unit.

Did you create these?

Given the surrounding context I read that sentence to mean that focusing on compute density allowed them to sell each core at a lower price vs focusing on performance, not that Graviton 3 is cheaper than Graviton 2.

Graviton 2 (c6g) also cost more than the Graviton 1 (a1) instances

It would be irrational to expect a durable lower price on graviton. Amazon will price it lower initially to entice customers to port their apps, but after they get a critical mass of demand the price will rise to a steady state where it costs the same as Intel. The only difference will be which guy is taking your money.

Do you have a cite on Amazon raising prices like that at any other point in their history?

I don’t think Amazon has ever raised their prices. This comment is based on nothing

I mean, they just raised their graviton prices between generations.

I don’t think the point was that they would increase the cost of existing instance types, only that over time and generations the price will trend upwards as more workloads shift over.

I wouldn't call that "raising prices"... you can still use Graviton 2 if it's a better price for you.

Prime has gone up quite a bit

Nearly every business seeks to maximize profit. Right now AWS is in growth phase - why wouldn't they raise rates in the future?

I dunno, this take is a bit weird to me. The work we did to support Graviton wasn't "moving" from Intel to ARM, it was making our build pipeline arch-agnostic. If Intel one day works out cheaper again we'll use it again with basically zero friction.

Same

Its great that your migration worked in a way that made your deployment pipeline arch agnostic. Expecting everyone did it that way? Not sure about that.

I bet quite a lot of migrations involved changing hardcoded instance types, docker image shas etc. Would be hard to revert back to quickly.

I think the take is pretty good one.

Then you'll be locked in as GP implies, but not because of AWS, because of your own substandard engineering.

When is the last time Amazon has raised cloud prices?

Literally 6 days ago when they introduced this thing.

> Literally 6 days ago when they introduced this thing.

Offering a new option is not a price increase. You can still do all the same things at the same prices, plus if the new thing is more efficient for your particular task you have an additional option.

When they introduced c6i they did it at the same price as c5, even though the c6i is a lot more efficient. They're raising the price on c7g vs. c6g to bring it closer to the pricing of c6i, which is pretty much exactly what I suggested?

You're being highly obtuse.

Universally everyone understands "raising prices" to be - "raising prices without any customer action".

As in you consider your options, take into consideration pricing, design your architecture, you deploy it, and you get a bill. Then suddenly, later, without any action of your own, your bill goes up.

THAT is raising prices, and it is something AWS has essentially never done.

What you're describing is a situation where a customer CHOOSES to upgrade to a new generation of instances, and in doing so gets a larger bill. That is nowhere near the same thing.

I read the original post and didn't consider an interpretation other than Graviton would lose the Intel relative discount generation on generation. It'll take a decade for everyone to port their software after all.

Considering blank stares that I get when mentioning arm as potential cost saving measure it will take years and maybe decades before that happens by which point you’re def getting your money’s worth as early adopter

I honestly think it's because of shortage of CPU. If everyone switches over, they won't have enough hardware. Looking at the phoronixbenchmarks[0] it's a great uplift for the slight price increase.

I'm sure once hardware settles it'll go down in price. Given this was announced like 6 months ago, I'm sure they wanted to launch something.

It doesn't even have spot pricing yet.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=aws-grav...

M6i is the same price as M5 rather than cheaper as well. It seems like they've had difficulty driving prices down this generation.

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