Hacker News Reader

Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them.

Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.

ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.

View on HN

I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this:

>Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...

The Amazon Graviton started by using stock ARM A72 cores.

Oracle, and even Microsoft, have decently large arm64 deployments now too (compared to nothing).

ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible.

I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell).

Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality.

(yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really long time to get them while costing just as much as AMD EPYC Milan's).

ARM server CPUs are great, I'd move all of our stuff to them once more competition happens. Give it a few more years.

You can get them on Oracle cloud servers for whatever you choose to do, last i looked and used them.

HPE has an Ampere server line that is quite good, especially considering TCO, density, and the IO it can pack. But yeah you'll have to fork some cash.

I'm using Ampere powered servers on Oracle cloud and boy, they're snappy, even with the virtualization layer on top.

Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them on demand, too.

Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some supercomputer centers also started to install "experimental" ARM partitions.

The future is bright not because Intel is floundering, but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM, AMD and Intel).

Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if they wish. They're just making different trade-offs because of the market they're in.

I used servers which randomly fried parts of their motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2 port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.

Since roughly the first year of covid the supply generally has been quite bad. Yes, I can get _some_ xeon or epyc from HPE quickly, but if I care about specific specs it's also a several month long wait. For midsized servers (up to about 100 total threads) AMD still doesn't really have competition if you look at price, performance and power - I'm currently waiting for such a machine, the intel option would've been 30% more expensive at worse specs.

It'll probably get get there, but it'll probably be a slow migration. After all, no point in tossing out all the Xeon that still have a few years left in them. But I believe Google is now also talking about or is already working on their own custom chip similar to Graviton now. [1]

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...

> Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021

I'm guessing this has increased since 2021. I've moved the majority of our AWS workloads to ARM because the price savings (it mostly 'just works'). If companies are starting to tighten their belts, this could accelerate even more ARM adoption.

> Intel never "crushed" ARM.

They certainly tried selling their chips below cost to move into markets ARM dominated, but "contra revenue" couldn't save them.

> Intel Corp.’s Contra-Revenue Strategy Was a Huge Waste of Money

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corp...

The name they chose to try and make it not sound like anti-competitive practices just makes it sound like Iran-Contra

They didn’t just fail to develop a mobile processor, they laughed and said no when Apple came knocking got the iPhone 1 and so Apple went to Motorola.

So much of Intels decline reeks of arrogant MBAs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com