[anon102010]

I wish google / aws would avoid the overlapping names where possible.

the "A" series on AWS = AMD instances

The "A" series on GCP = Nvidia instances.

I know - probably on no ones radar at all :)

[boulos]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Even worse is that for GCE, A was for AMD originally (and N was for iNtel). In any case, this A is for Accelerator.

[jeffbee]

Are there any papers or blogs about how these GPUs are attached to the host? I find it interesting that you can get a VM with 96 vCPUs, which I assume amounts to a whole box (2x24-core hyperthreaded Xeon CPUs?) but either 8 or 16 GPUs. How does that keep from stranding 8 GPUs? Is there some kind of rack-wide PCIe switch that can attach GPUs to various hosts or ??

[boulos]

We sadly don’t talk about how we rack these at all, but the folks at Facebook have made their OCP designs public for vaguely similar systems.

However, I’ll note that the 16 A100s here are way more expensive than the cpu cores (and we can just run vanilla VMs on those left over cores if really needed).

[cperciva]

It's even worse than that. On AWS, A1 is ARM. The successor to A1 is M6G.

Meanwhile M5A, as you note, is AMD.

[codemk8]

For azure, NC is for vms with NVidia card. Seems that they deliberately choose different terms.

[mcspiff]

Also ARM, sometimes, on AWS. A1 = first generation of Gravitron.

Of course second generation uses names like m6g to keep us on our toes..

[sradman]

And the new server-side ARM competitor to the Graviton is the Ampere Altra [1] which has nothing to do with the NVIDIA Ampere.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475036

[txcwpalpha]

Worse than that, "A"/"a" on AWS can actually mean AMD or ARM. An "a1.large" instance is an instance with a first-gen Graviton ARM CPU (whereas the second-gen Graviton2 ARM CPUs are something like "c6g.large"). A "c5a.large" is an instance with a x86 AMD CPU.