Google Has Developed Its Own Data Center Server Chips | Hacker News Reader

Google Has Developed Its Own Data Center Server Chips

tomshardware.com

18 pointswebmaven9 comments

I wonder what is unlocked by creating their chip that couldn’t also be achieved using intel and nvidia products? Surely the same product can be delivered but the main difference is energy use?

What % of google’s costs is energy? Is the whole exercise of making their own chips just to save some energy cost or is there a bigger goal with it?

Cost savings.

1. The best Server Chip in terms of throughput is no longer an Intel only game, if anything it is chips Fabbed from TSMC which has a node advantage.

2. The ARM IP model has a much lower entry barrier.

3. Pref / Watt and Energy Cost saving are real.

4. HyperScaler represent roughly 50% of Intel's Enterprise Revenue. Just to give you an idea of its scale.

5. Google no longer needs to rely on x86 for its Backend Stack. And they have plenty of experience with ARM.

Google did this for the same reasons AWS created Graviton; the article kind of mentions this: lower energy consumption, better performance for common workloads, and improved security.

It's a little different.

When Graviton started there were barely any ARM64 server makers in the market (1s that are likely in it for the long game). Intel was stuck and AMD wasn't as much of a thing as well.

Intel / AMD has vastly improved and ARM64 has been more commonplace (both GCP and Azure do have ARM64 server offerings).

Right now the most important factor besides cost might be ensuring supply. With the chip shortages there was a huge backlog and who knows when it might happen again.

Would you be able to provide a source or examples relating to the "improved security" claim? I'm not doubting you, I'd just love to learn more about whether the improvements are just architectural (x64 -> ARM) or not

From the relevant product page [0]:

"AWS Graviton3 processors feature always-on memory encryption, dedicated caches for every vCPU, and support for pointer authentication."

Further reading on pointer authentication [1].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...

And lack of competition? Even if they are huge players I am sure they are basically kept hostage of their server chip providers. There is not much to choose from.

Not quite a hostage scenario when it comes to a commodity like processors. Funnily enough, AWS had bought the company behind Graviton, Annapurna Labs.

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